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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."
On the part of the site that was working, the pixel fonts reminded me of a time I tried to make Microsoft Word have the look of the old DOS Wordperfect. I managed to make the background blue, though it was really bright, and I managed to make the text gray. But I couldn't find the right monospaced, pixelly font. Has anybody else tried to do this, or am I just psycho? I thought that Wordperfect was much more fun to write in. I always felt like Doogie Howser.
(Also, for a supposed icon expert, how come the portfolio icon doesn't really evoke portfolio so much as "person writing"?)
I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB ... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
This would make sense if people pattern matched to words but they don't. Take a group of people and allow them to press a button corresponding to a meaning and then show them pictures. Then do the same with words, the picture responses will be *much* faster. We are visual creatures.
--- I do not moderate.
AFAIK, the beachball first showed up as the wait cursor for MPW (Apple's pre-Mac OS X command line development environment). It started showing up in other software after that.
In terms of the official busy cursor, you're right, it was a wristwatch.
Some of the best icons ever created were by Keith Ohlfs for NeXTstep. Amazing what he could pack into 64x64 2-bit greyscale pixels.
Check out his latest work at Pixelsight
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
I can store the collective works of Shakespeare in a 10 Mb zip file. The collective paintings of Michelangelo, scanned and compressed with zero data loss, would probably be 100 Gb at least.
And yet, the collective works of Susan Kare could probably be compressed down to 1 or 2 kilobytes. Talk about minimalism!
Icons are nice to learn where things are. Eventually the muscle memory takes over and they become unnecessary. You could change my trashcan icon to a picture of anything and I would still drag files to it because I know that that's where the trash is.
I modified the icon bar in Mail.app the way I liked it and have been using it that way for about a year now. I recently mucked it up and had to reinstall it. I modifed the icon bar again, but didn't put the "delete" button back in the same spot. Good thing the icon is there, because my mouse still automagically moves to where it is 'supposed' to be, but isn't anymore.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
I have her "Be Good" t-shirt (with the Pope icon on it.) I always get good comments on that one.
If you really want to be impressed, check out her five dots and six dots fonts. They're beautiful. I use them regularly for detail work in my webpages (including my homepage.) Just great. Well worth the money.
I remember making Mac icons myself. One of the most interesting/exploitable things about early Mac icons was that they were somewhat viral. If you instered a disk with an icon that the system didn't have, it would add it to the systems set of icons. Sometimes it would even replace an 'official' icon with the hacked one, but I never quite figured out when it would vs. wouldn't do this.
As an example, I was bored waiting for someone I carpooled with in college, so I started diddling around on one of the campus library computing lab's macs. Using resedit I changed the MacPaint icon to a rather x-rated female figure. (rather difficult to do well in 16x16 pixels, or whatever it was). About 6 months later one of my frat brother's younger sibling showed me "this neat icon that replaced the MacPaint icons at high school"... It was my icon!
When I had made it originaly I didn't know it would spread (bad pun), I expected it to just mess with the one library machine. Experimenting some more I discovered the icon capturing effect, but as I said I never figured out the complete set of rules.
That's right, everything you needed to customize your computer's behavior, condensed into a single window 312x155 (roughly) pixels in size. What's more, all the functions are discoverable, neither instruction nor a help file is necessary to use it. It's perhaps one of the most brilliant examples of efficient information display ever realized on a personal computer, plus interactivity thrown in for good measure.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I interned for a summer at an Apple site in Campbell CA doing some graphic design, MM Director presentations, that kind of thing. We burned some out to CDs, back when that meant writing the data out to a Bernoulli disk or somesuch, then heading over to the washing-maching sized unit to try to create a test disk, then back to correct the formatting, etc, etc.
At any rate I remember trying out a test disk on one of the Macs at the end of the day, only the formatting was of course incorrect and the machine froze up. Upon rebooting, it tried to read the hosed CD, failed miserably and to my horror blasted out the Chimes of Death for all to hear.
The only thing worse than hearing the Chimes of Death is seeing a bunch of heads peering in over the cubicle walls to see which miserable intern had just caused the Chimes to sound....
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
This is what Linux needs (i.e., gnome/kde) - some GOOD icons. I'm sorry, but the stuff that's being used now is crap. A mix of artsy, well drawn crap with crapy crap. This woman's icons both a) LOOK GOOD, and b) convey MEANING...
Let's politely (after the nasty slashdoting) ask her to whip some up for us. I'd paypal a few $'s for some nice, professional KDE icons, wouldn't you?
I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples: The cross. National flags. The gold-star sticker.
I'm not sure you can define the cross, or national flags, or other extremely common symbols as "art", unless you want to stretch stretching the definition to the point of absurdity... i.e. saying that "art" includes all human symbols and structures that can be represented visually. Is the symbol of a circle "art"? How about a white flag, or a crescent moon?
What distinguishes art from mere symbols? "Art" has to be copied faithfully to the original form. Susan Kane's icons appear, pixel for pixel, exactly as she created them. Their origin can be traced to a single, original source (the artist).
Symbols like the cross have been visually represented in millions of different forms by millions of people. The symbolic origin is obvious (crucifixion of Christ), but there is no such "artistic" origin. The cross is a symbol not because one brilliant artist invented it, but because it was a simple and obvious way to represent an event that was passed along through oral and written tradition.
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.
I use MS Windows and Linux and HPUX and Solaris and even ftx (a Stratus OS) on a daily basis. I've also been using and programming the Mac since a few weeks after it came out.
If you're not familiar with the Mac after nearly two decades then I'm sorry but you are *NOT* computer literate.
It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.
It was designed to be accessable to the computer illiterate. But that's an inclusive thing, not exclusive. It is (and always has been) a superb machine for software hackers because it has a much more open and customizable operating system than MSDOS or Windows have ever had. YOu can replace or enhance *anything*.
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
What a strange thing to say when the Mac "HFS" file system is nearly unique in being based totally around b-trees for the directory and file extents structures! There isn't a flat array or linked list in sight.
Of course - but it's courtesy to warn someone that they're going to have nearly a million people one link away from their site. Not many of these small sites are able to handle that much traffic, this much is blatently obvious.
Well, maybe she designed the original Mac artwork on an SGI... :-)
OTOH, they're small enough she could easily have designed them on graph paper with a pencil, then converted them to hexadecimal and keyed them into the computer. (I designed a font for the TI99-4/A that way, then wrote a BASIC program to load it!)
I'm an Amiga fanatic as well, but Kare really is the Mother of All Icons, in the sense that anyone can be. The Mac was the first 'consumer' system with a default GUI.
Things to note:
-The Mac did beat Amiga to market by a year.
-The Lisa predated it, anyway.
-I'm not sure exactly which Amiga addon you're thinking of, but the Amiga featured easily-replaced icons and pointers from the start.
-The Amiga team was working within a few Commodore-mandated restraints. The roughly ~640x200 resolution was picked to allow reuse of CRTs CBM had on hand (the team wanted a more standard 'scandoubled' resolution), and the 1000 was to ship with only 256k (given the RAM crisis of the time).
-Further, the 1000 did not have a Kickstart ROM, meaning Kickstart (equivalent to a Mac's ROM) would use precious RAM. As the basic windowdressing was incorporated in the Intuition code (and thus part of Kickstart), keeping the number of bitmaps to a minimum was important. This is also why the original Workbench screen used a 4-color (out of 4096+) palette, when the chipset itself was capable of much more.
As such, the graphic design *was* fairly minimalist, but this left room for applications to shine. Contrast this to the original Mac, which was so useless the 'Fat' model had to be introduced only months later. (Those limitations also meant you were spending much longer staring at the desktop on a Mac, while on an Amiga, your app was launched- probably on its own screen- and you were getting actual work done.)
Another fun note about usability- with the original intention as a games system, and some confusion as to the eventual shape of the computer version (remember, these guys didn't even know if they'd be working for Atari or Commodore), the "hideous" Blue-White-Orange-Black scheme derived from experiments with the worst, most-burned-out TVs they could find. That palette, they determined, had the best contrast on even the worst tubes. (In those days, it was rare for a home's *good* TV to be dedicated to a personal computer.)