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Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate)
bughunter writes "One of today's Yahoo Daily Picks is the personal exhibit of Susan Kare: the mimimalist creator of most of the original Macintosh icons then, later, the iconic elements for Windows 3.0, and she didn't stop there. More than just icons, her GUI elements have become part of the modern collective subconscious - trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over. (I can personally attest that the Mac System 6 beachball is burned into my soul...) She deserves some recognition of her own."
trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over
WTF is a Happy Mac?
I'm computer literate. I've worked on dozens of systems from the commodore PET to the IBM Sys/36 and AS400 to HP 3000 and lately some of the Stratus boxes that started rolling through our companies 'bullpen'.
I've never used a mac except a few times in passing. It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
Oh well, I guess owning a Mac makes you some sort of IT hero around slashdot.
You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about.
It's like calling those chimpanzees who point at the picture of a banana when they're hungry 'literate'.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
All of them. Here's why:
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection. Even the lowly trashcan: Its appearance varies widely from desktop to desktop. The word "trashcan" is widely recognized in the language of your choice, regardless of the font used (well, let's stick to readable fonts, not Wingdings). Different trashcan icons take precious brain cycles away from important stuff in order to determine that said icon is, in fact, the trashcan on the MacOS 9.x desktop (or whatever your poison might be).
It's my desire to see all icons with a simple one-word description in place of the pictures. The extra level of indirection (recognize icon using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) is really unnecessary.
Desktops may not look very pretty, but they'll sure as hell be more functional with icons replaced with "wordcons."
Tell me again why we are supposed to care about this? There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.
If I put a perl virus here, I wonder how many people would run it, just to see what it did...
:-)
More than you think... check my signature
bash$
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Jolly memories.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life