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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.
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.
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"?)
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 gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.
I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
I'd never really thought of icon creators as artists before, but I suppose they deserve recognition with the more familiar artists.
Just think: together with the "NBC Peacock" guy and a handful of other logo creators, Susan Kare's "art" has probably been viewed and used my more people, for more hours, than any conventional artistic works in human history... and all in the space of two short decades.
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?
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).
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!
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]
Good. So instead of just /.ing her, we do it on a day when the site's address has just been emailed out to thousands of link-starved people too.
Script Kiddies wish they had that much power.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Does it return a sad webserver icon?
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.
Well around here I don't know of ANY IT guys that know any of that. Here IT guys usually refers to the systems support guys (you know, the ones that maintain the network, sets up computers, gives you flack for installing non standard software, etc). The stuff you mention usually is the domain of the developers (or engineers if you prefer).
BTW, the Happy Mac was the icon you saw when your Mac passed all it's boot checks and was booting "normally" (vs the Sad Mac which you saw if your machine was hosed).
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
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.
And you bitch about Mac elitism? Listen to yourself dude.
/. think back to the old macs they owned or used in school.
"I've never used a mac except for a few times in passing, blah blah, it's only for the computer illiterate, blah blah, I obviously know everything about computers because I know a couple coding techniques so I'm right and you're wrong, blah blah blah"
I'm sorry that you didn't feel included when the editor said that computer literate people know the Happy Mac icon, but damn, lay off the hostility...there's no need to call for jihad. If you don't like macs and never have, good for you, that's your choice. If you can reminesce about your Commodore PET, then let the other 95% of the people on
As far as arrogance derived from coding or system administration skill goes, it is unfounded. You're not cool and you're not making a difference. Any reasonably intelligent person can perform these tasks given the time and desire. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
Now hopefully we'll both be modded down as trolls and we can go on with our lives.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
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
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 /. ;)
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!
Because when I applied 1000 monkeys designing icons on 16x16 I found that she'd already come up with all the good ones.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point of icons is not so much that you can instantly know the function of an unfamiliar icon by looking at the picture. It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does. I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons. You also need much less screen real estate in a small icon (such as a toolbar button) than an equivalent text button.
Even though you are trying to look as if you know something about UI and usablility, you obviously don't know anything.
Score -1, misleading.
Moof! Says the dogcow.
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)
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.
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!
Maybe you should get some better-educated IT guys. Knowledge of the way computers and software work can help one make intelligent decisions about how to set them up, help one diagnose problems, and help one write custom software to get a job done.
How does knowledge of how a btree works help someone figure out a driver issue? There is a huge difference in having a basic understanding of how software environments work vs specific algorithms (which is the the OP referred to). What would an IT person be coding to require them to know about the complexities of freeing/allocating memory. Hell, the current thinking is that we don't want PROGRAMMERS (Java, C#, HLL, scripting, etc) to have to deal with such issues, let alone the guy who unpacks the Dell and installs Office a dozen times a day.
Good admins are programmers/engineers, too. That makes them more expensive, but they can be much more efficient and flexible that way.
I disagree. Anyone who knows any more than very basic programming will probably be a programmer. You get paid more and you put up with a lot less sh*t, assuming of course you can find a job right now, in which case they would settle for an IT job to pay the bills. The only time I see programmers act as IT guys is in small shops that can't afford full time IT folk (or if their IT folk are like many of the IT folk I've met and sometimes take, umm, a while shall we say to get what seems like the most basic things done, like add more ram to your system). And I would never let an IT guy near any code (other than os scripting).
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?
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
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.
Archive.org link
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_2.gif
http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_6.gif
etc...
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.
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.
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...
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
I used to design icons (still do sometimes) so feel free to regard my reply as a little bit biased.
O OOTOOOOOOO
A poorly made set of icons can indeed be worse than text. I think the really crucial element is whether different icons or wordcons are easily distinguishable. Your brain can easily pick out unique features. for example:
OOOOOOOOOOOOOQOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
notice how that T is much easier to spot that that Q? Icons that all look similar will be more difficult to pick out than words. However, to some extent, text looks like text looks like text, and a set of icons that have been designed to be easily distinguishable from each other will be easier for most people to pick out than a bunch of wordcons. Yes, there is a learning curve where you have to figure out what the icons mean, but I typically learn that pretty fast, and then I process icons faster than text. I would say that once they are learned, you're stripping away a "level of indirection". After all, kids who haven't learned to read yet can process pictures... you learn how to do that very early.
As an aside, people read lowercase, serifed fonts faster than uppercase sans-serif fonts because uppercase sans-serif fonts have fewer distinguishing features for each letter. Your speed of reading, or your speed of picking out icons, doesn't happen on a conscious level. Even if you're annoyed by icons, they might be helping you anyway.
Your point about the trashcan icon is kind of interesting, and true. The point of an icon is that it evokes a general concept. A trashcan icon that is too detailed can make you think of a particular trash can, or a particular type of trashcan -- a simple one should just make you think of the platonic form of trashcan. It should work sort of like the word "trashcan", except that you can read it faster, and tell it apart from other icons more easily. (That's why the simplicity of Kare's icons is so awesome.) So yes, it would work much better if it's appearance were consistent across OS's.
The idea of trying to pick a tool in photoshop using printed names -- "paintbrush, history brush, pencil" -- instead of icons makes me shudder.
blah blah blah
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.
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.)