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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."
I'm actually wearing a Susan Kare t-shirt right now.
The one with the bomb icon on it.
I don't wear it at airports.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Slashdotted without a comment in sight!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
If you click the Windows 3.0 icons you get an error. Its so cool that she managed to emulate windows on her web page :)
/.ing has died down I think it will really be worth a look even for a retro kick. She designed the solitare cards for God's sake. How many hours of my life has that accounted for? :)
Seriously though when the
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Her server resources were even more minimalist than her icons...
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
I'll never forget the first time I saw the "sad Mac" icon during bootup. It made me chuckle and would have been even more amusing had it not been for the fact that my system would no longer boot.
I stopped using macs soon after that.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Does it return a sad webserver icon?
Hashing a with buckets makes out of a Happy Mac a collection of groups of Not So Happy Mac parts of similar size, but of unrelated use.
A B-Tree is stuffing a lot of Happy Macs to a lot of 'X's, so you can smash them faster because of their physical nearness. But keep them in countable pile, so you don't lost track of them.
A two-handed clock algorithm is a attempt at stopping a clock with both hands, which bears the problem that one hand is catching the other.
And Google is the answer to all questions
Where is my banana?
(I admit, that I was not aware that Happy Mac stood for "that icon", too.)
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
you're the cause of so much wasted time (outside of /. ;)
Because when I applied 1000 monkeys designing icons on 16x16 I found that she'd already come up with all the good ones.
Heh, I remember my science teacher in high school getting those when he accidently plugged his keyboard into a s-video port (or something of the like) They were pretty cool. I do remember it took some real problems to get the sad mac.
-Zeal17
"If it sucks without butter, it still sucks with butter, only creamier." - AC
Given that you can only realistically expect about twenty unique designs per monkey, you really need 200,000,000 monkeys (for a 16x16 black and white canvas). Given that there are only a 12 monkeys to the barrel, that's a quite a lot of fun!
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
I remember that the Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal (BLIT) bitmapped terminal used a coffee cup (i.e. "go get a cup of coffee while you wait") icon for waiting, which gives you an idea of how long you had to wait sometimes...always got a kick out of that. Bring the coffee cup to the Mac!
Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.
Here's a picture
Her icon for "500 Internal Server Error" leaves much to be desired.
Wouldn't it be interesting to learn that she designed the Windows 3.1 icons on Mac Paint? :)
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
wow, can you imagine just how much money she is probably going to make off of her online store today? that part of the site is fully operational, lol. cgi scripts that display her portfolio (icons she created) are dead through...
Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)
The replacement sound is screeching brakes and a big explosion played at full volume. I don't think they changed it because the old sound was too scary.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Really? Man were you lucky, I had to design a series of 1*0 pixel icons, all of which represented a diffrent machine status. Not only that, but it was on a monochrome monitor, and couldn't be on OR off. I needed to make up my own color when I didn't have anything to work with. You kids have it far too easy.
n.
1. One who advocates a moderate or conservative approach, action, or policy, as in a political or governmental organization.
2. A practitioner of minimalism.
adj.
1. Of, relating to, characteristic of, or in the style of minimalism.
2. Being or providing a bare minimum of what is necessary.
anything but the comforting Mac "bong" would scare the hell out of me
Wow, that's a good use for one of the old one piece Macs. I imagine it's much more stylish than an IBM compatible bong.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.