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."

Comments

neato

[SweetAndSourJesus]

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.

Evidently...

[Hanji]

Her server resources were even more minimalist than her icons...

Talk about an audience

[sssmashy]

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.

Cultural problems

[SuperBanana]

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.

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 :-)

Re:Icons are Evil.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Complete and utter bullshit. Research shows that good icons are remembered and that they are more distingashable than a word and of course, take up less space. This is the whole point of icons.

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.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[metamanda]

I used to design icons (still do sometimes) so feel free to regard my reply as a little bit biased.

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
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOTOOOOOOO

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.