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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."
This was /. before it even went live. Here is the google cache but it won't let you see the pretty icons.
She also worked on some of the icons at Eazel (she did the first Nautilus vector theme) and some of the fonts for Danger (who make the hiptop/sidekick).
If you just search for Susan Kare using Google Images, you'll find quite a few examples.
Karma whoring mode ON:
Google Cache Links:
iconic elements for Windows 3.0 [Google Cache Link]
original Macintosh icons [Google Cache Link]
The happy mac icon is shown during boot as long as things still are going OK. When it changes into a sad mac, it has apparently encountered some problem.
is an icon of an old single unit Macintosh computer with a smiley face showing on the screen. But why take my word for it when a picture is worth a thousand words
I'm a bit miffed that this article doesn't mention the great amiga icon designers. The amiga also used the 'watch' icon, and a pointer, it also used a paper with a folded over top as representing a document, and many of the other icons on the site linked to in the article, and it used them before the macintosh.
I'm not saying there should be a copyright on icons as simple as these, they're too tiny to be quarreled over, but surely the correct recognition is due?
With that 16x16 canvas, this woman managed to make images that have become part of everyday household life for many people. Her work has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people at least, and I believe some of her work is still showcased in the moricons.dll file. Just because a canvas is small, doesn't mean it's unimportant.
Some folks may remember the happy mac actually winked at you during startup in one of the OS 8 versions. It was quickly yanked- Apple supposedly got a backlash(or feared one) from cultures/countries where winking is offensive; search on google and you'll find a ton of links about it.
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.)
Random trivia- most of the original Macintosh's ROM was taken up by a COLOR image of the Macintosh development team. My 660AV's ROM contained an image of the team(much larger) at a beachparty. It is so sad to see that easter eggs have pretty much been killed off for years now in apple hardware/software.
Curious- Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?
Obligitory slashdotting joke: Her site could use the SPOD right about now :-)
Please help metamoderate.
Create a shortcut on your Windows desktop. Right click it, then pick properties. You should see a button toward the bottom labeled "Change Icon." Click that, and put the path to moricons.dll in the text box. Voila, you can see the icons.
Moof! Says the dogcow.
This Susan Kare chick is a MILF!
Results for GIS of "Susan Kare"
The beach ball referred to was the wait cursor for MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop).
It was copied widely in numerous popular 3rd party applications, but you are correct in that the official wait cursor for the OS was the watch cursor.
The spinning disc cursor used in OS X is a descendent of the wait cursor from NeXTStep, which was originally used to indicate that the Magneto-Optical disc was in use.
If you don't care about piddly little things like context, you can go straight to her images folder here:
http://kare.com/images/
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Archive.org link
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_2.gif
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_6.gif
etc...
To the curious: to interpret parent's signature, imagine replacing the colon with the word "foo". It's much more legible that way.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
except that "foo" would return an error message ("foo: command not found"), while the colon wouldn't. Well, it's more like a noop in assembler, but it's still a valid shell command. If you relly want a shell synonim to ":", then use "true". "true" does nothing more but return a zero as exit value, which is the same as what ":" does.
Sigged!
Actually, before the current Jaguar "pinwheel" implementation, it was a spinning rainbow disk platter, a holdover from the magneto-optical disks from the NeXT computer era.
My first dealing with OS X had this spinning icon appear after opening a file, and it brought back memories of the older NeXT operating system I used to use back in the 90's.
I was rather sad to see it go in the current version of OS X, I always considered it a sort of tribute to OS X's beginnings.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
the NBC Peackock, Rockefeller center, Mobil Gasoline among others were done by Chermayeff Y Geismar Associates between 1960 and 1970. Paul Rand was another designer that did a lot of the iconography we recognize today, like the IBM logo, NEXT, & Westinghouse... sorry about the history lesson... had just finished reading about it for a class...
You'll find all the Microsoft free web fonts (inc. Andale Mono) at corefonts.sourceforge.net - all perfectly legal, btw, and even with the option of an rpm package.
try here.
I found copies of both the crash sounds, and the startup sounds here. I recommend the 'Crash Mac Quadra' file.
But then again, I could be wrong.
The "spinning pizza of death" actually originated as a graphical representation of the original NeXT hardware's only winchester-esque drive: the magnet-optical. The alternating black and white slices of the disc were meant to represent reflections on the mirror surface of the disc. (These drives were rather slow, particularly so when writing, due to the two-stage Curie Point process. If the NeXT was waiting for something, it was probably a write to finish, thus the cursor.)
Upon the release of color NeXT hardware, NeXTStep 2.x 'colorized' the disc cursor. This had the side-effect of removing it by a degree from the original visual metaphor.
OS X 1.1 and below had the same, colorized cursor, often referred to as the "spinning beach ball" due to the coloration. 10.2 Aqua-fied the icon, so it now looks... sort of like a gummi something.
(Mac OS 8 and above had their own version of the "spinning beach ball", but that originiated IIRC in HyperCard as a cursor for when the program was busy. I don't believe it was ever colorized - and it was black and white quarters of a circle, unlike the 2-bit (4 grey) NeXTStep optical disc cursor. This cursor is superficially similar to, but as the above narrative describes, historically separate from, the NeXT-derived OS X cursor.)
*Sigh*. You've obviously never used Mac Paint. The mac paint format (and program) only allows for 2 bit color (black and white). Kind've hard to design the *color* Windows 3.1 icons on it.
.mac to .bmp. I think MS probably just gave her PC to use...
Not to mention the potential difficulty in transferring the file from a mac to a PC. Macs didn't natively support DOS formatted disks back then, and only a few obscure apps that allowed DOS to read Mac formatted disks. I suppose you could resort to a serial connection or modem and a file transfer protocol. Even then you'd have to convert
If you want the bios font, here is a link to it:
biosfont.fon
Enjoy,
calamari