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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare

Posted by timothy on from the ideas-in-action dept.

theodp writes "The Mac wasn't the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor, but it was the sketchbook of Susan Kare that gave computing a human face to the masses. After graduating from NYU with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare was working on a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel when she got a call from high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld offering her a job to work on the Mac. The rest, as they say, is UI history. Armed with a $2.50 sketchbook, Kare crafted the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing. BTW, just in time for holiday gift-giving, Kare has self-published her first book, Susan Kare Icons. So, could computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?"

35 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. A few less MBAs.... by mevets · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is there any field that couldn't use less MBAs? It is a sort of community service to get the poor critters off the street, but they sure make a mess of things. Maybe we can find them a nice island somewhere.

    1. Re:A few less MBAs.... by yuhong · · Score: 2

      I know. How about retraining them, if possible?

    2. Re:A few less MBAs.... by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's less about having less MBA, and simply having less people telling actual creators and innovators what to do, and what not to do.

      Our society is going nowhere if our developments and actions are being decided by people who don't understand what the things they're making decisions about.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    3. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Keen+Anthony · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I realize you're just taking the piss, but as an MBA who has always understood technology, I've done fairly well. It's always fun to make fun of the MBAs when you're on the tech side, but the fact is, engineers don't know how to run companies. They don't know how to develop markets. They don't know how to sell products. Sure, they can make truly epic prototypes that look really awesome sitting in a private room. I've seen a lot of cool tech wizardry that went nowhere. Every successful example of computer technology has depended on a mix of both. But we can always do with fewer lawyers, totally.

    4. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Half a decade before the Macintosh, a Harvard MBA named Dan Bricklin invented the first spreadsheet application, VisiCalc. It's not about having people with or without degrees, it's about having creative and innovative people, whatever their background.

    5. Re:A few less MBAs.... by BasilBrush · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergy Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg... Not an MBA amongst them. Where are these MBAs that know how to run companies?

    6. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      "The percentage of top 100 CEOs who earned an M.B.A. decreased from 37% in 2003 to 36% in 2004, to 35% this year [2005]. The percentage of all S&P 500 CEOs who have an M.B.A. has increased from 37% to 39% over the past two years."

      content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf

      There are a lot of MBAs who successfully run large corporations, but I realize that its fun to hate on them here.

    7. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Keen+Anthony · · Score: 3, Informative

      Seriously? The point isn't that people who hold Masters in Business Administration know best per se, it is that successful technology businesses are not the result of good engineering, but the result of a mix of engineering, good business management, and marketing expertise. This is traditionally the area of the MBA, but this doesn't imply that a computer scientist can never ever under any circumstances understand things like SWOT. It means that understanding how to make a business successful is separate from knowing how to make cool technology. You have identified four companies out of an entire industry populated by many successful tech companies operated by businessmen. And incidentally, Steve Jobs is not an engineer or a computer scientist. Nor are Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. None of these guys fits the profile of the typical software engineer. And Sergy Brin and Larry Page worked with Eric Schmidt who possessed executive experience, realizing the need for someone who understood how to run a business.

    8. Re:A few less MBAs.... by BasilBrush · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You're missing what is in common with the names I mentioned. What percentage of people who CREATED successful companies are MBAs. How close to 0%?

      Sure once the founders retire or die, the companies find new people to run them. At that stage MBAs seem like the right qualification. But those MBAs are invariably far less successful than the founders.

    9. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Missing.Matter · · Score: 2

      dropping out of college to create a company is an even bigger pointer to success than not being an MBA.

      That's only because you're looking at already successful companies and then looking at how they got started. What about all the kids who dropped out of college to start a company that failed?

    10. Re:A few less MBAs.... by BasilBrush · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm no fan of Bill Gates, but he did write the original Microsoft BASIC back in the mid 1970s, and fit it in 4K, the first person do do such a thing. Now, lots of people could do it, but then, with the tools and knowledge of the day it was quite a feat. He's certainly a software engineer, and a notable one at that.

      I like to make fun of web app developers too. But in reality it is real software engineering, often with a greater variety of skills needed than classic programming. Not for the simplest web sites, but certainly for something like a social app.

      I agree they are scumbags, but they are successful company founding software engineer scumbags.

    11. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Keen+Anthony · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Fine, off the top of my head: Paul Otellini, Meg Whitman, Kevin Rollins, John Scully, Sam Palmisano, Lee Kun-hee, Zhentang Wang, Carly Fiorina, Greg Brown. Granted, some of these names comes with caveats. You either loved Fiorina's HP or you hated according to the insiders I knew. Greg Brown's degree was in economics. John Scully's Apple isn't everyone's favorite. And eventually people turned on Kevin Rollins. Obviously, the tech industry has a smaller number of MBA chiefs than do other industries, but some people would argue that while they are not Google or Facebook; Intel, Dell, and Samsung are somewhat successful companies.

    12. Re:A few less MBAs.... by Raenex · · Score: 2

      You are thinking of Paul Allen. Yes, Gates was tangentially involved, but even Gates himself credits Allen as the brains behind the work, and it was Allen who had the background and skills.

      Your version of the story isn't supported by evidence. You might try reading Paul Allen's version:

      "I'd occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our late-nighters. He'd be in the middle of a line of code when he'd gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing for an hour or two, he'd open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he'd left off--a prodigious feat of concentration. [..] And it was a true collaboration. I'd estimate that 45 percent of the code was Bill's, 30 percent Monte's, and 25 percent mine, excluding my development tools."

  2. Aha by Compuser · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So now I know who made the Mac so insufferably ugly. For me it was a retch at first sight. I think I may be the only one in the world but I have consistently hated every single artistic and stylistic choice Apple ever made with their GUI (their hardware designs sometimes look OK, e.g. iPhone 4)

    1. Re:Aha by Compuser · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I do not know why I got marked as flamebait. I clearly stated it was my personal opinion and I meant every word without intent of inciting a flamewar. Mods are on crack.
      That said, to me the ideal design of GUI so far has been Windows 95, with toolbar autohide. Horrible OS but imho best GUI ever. Clean, simple, rectangular without the horrible rounded corners. Grey background, forgettable fonts, and equally neutral pointer shapes.
      I have always hated icons and preferred text instead but I have yet to see a GUI with labels instead of pictures by default. Other than that - Windows 95 got most things right.

  3. So not everybody who did well dropped out... by fantomas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So not everybody who did well dropped out: a PhD in art history as well as a maker (her PhD thesis title "A study of the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honore Daumier and Claes Oldenburg").

    Nice to know it's possible to balance the two, it will make some of my PhD student friends very happy indeed :-)

  4. wrong by khipu · · Score: 2, Informative

    Shortly thereafter, Xerox doomed its chances to own the icon-driven future by pouring its resources into the Xerox Star, a product aimed strictly at the corporate market. Each Star purchase required an initial $75,000 installation and a network of external file servers, plus another $16,000 for each additional workstation (twice the price of a new car at the time). A digital revolution for the masses, it wasn’t.

    No, Xerox didn't "doom the future", they just started with an expensive first product and then were driving the cost down. Apple saw this and started cloning it. Their first attempt also cost about $10000 per workstation. Then Apple cut a lot of corners and drove the price down further to about $2500 (about $5000 in today's dollars). Corner cutting involved getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell, a shell that looked nice but was hell to program.

    1. Re:wrong by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Informative

      getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell

      Yeah, right. "Stripping". By adding things like pull down menus and drag and drop. Things that didn't exist on the Xerox system. Things that didn't exist at all till Apple invented them.

    2. Re:wrong by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

      Bullshit. Pulldown menus existed in many software products. What Apple 'invented' was a crippled little box with a collection of applets in it and no third party software for a year or so. The Mac 128 was a joke machine.

    3. Re:wrong by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Informative

      Bullshit. Pulldown menus existed in many software products.

      Name a single one that preceded the Lisa. You can't because Apple did indeed invent the pull down menu.

      Wikipedia even mentions it. Though they erroneously call them drop-down menus (which was a Microsoft variant) rather than pull down menus as Apple called them.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface

      I recognise your user name as someone who is very often wrong. I suggest you should do a little research before posting in future.

    4. Re:wrong by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Again, neither Xerox nor anyone else had pull-down menus nor anything like it. Xerox used buttons for commands. Either physical buttons on the custom keyboard, or screen buttons rather like a text button version of a modern day toolbar. Nothing like pull-down menus.

      So, what you call "pull down menus" was a minor graphical variation on existing practice at the time.

      There's nothing minor about it. The two dimensional menus within a menu concept was novel, new and is a central ingredient of most GUI OSs to this day.

      Whether or not it's attached to the screen or the app window *IS* a minor variation, yet that's something you bring up in the hope of changing this from a discussion of fact, to one of preference.

    5. Re:wrong by GrahamCox · · Score: 4, Informative

      No. You cannot compare it with anything that "was just around the corner" - it didn't exist yet. I don't recall AmigaOS being much ahead of the Mac (not "Mac OS", it wasn't called an OS for another 10 years), though it did have some nice features and eventually, some nice tools. Apart from Smalltalk, on which you might have a point, none of those other things would have been usable on a 68000 processor. It's questionable whether any sort of OOP runtime could have run on it. You could argue that the CPU was too small for the job, but the software was well tailored to the architecture they chose, for better or worse. The point is, it was a very productive way to program for a while. I'm not saying it was anywhere near perfect, but calling it a piece of shit is to judge it by the standards of today, not 1984.

    6. Re:wrong by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Many systems had a global hierarchical menu, some put them at the top, some used vertically stacked buttons, some used a menu button. Apple's choice was a minor variation of these systems,

      I've asked for a specific example. The only one you've given is Xerox, and you're wrong on that. Give it up.

      Yeah, you're just the typical Apple fanboy trying to rewrite history.

      On the contrary. I've given the history. I've linked to Wikipedia to prove it. You're the one who's denying history, without a scrap of anything to back you up. And the reason you're doing it is you hate Apple. Grow up.

  5. Plato was the inspiration by dak664 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Plato IV protoypes used a plasma panel with touch screen in the late '60s, and had downloadable characters you could point to to activate different functions. Not a far reach to make those program and folder icons.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

  6. Do you realize who this is? by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative

    Susan Kare is very well known in the visual design world. She is the world's leading icon designer. Not only did she do the icons for the Mac, she did some of the icons for Windows. And Autodesk products. And PayPal. And Facebook.

    (If the Linux crowd had someone that good, Linux on the desktop would probably be a success by now.)

    1. Re:Do you realize who this is? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      She did the icons for Nautilus too.

    2. Re:Do you realize who this is? by brantondaveperson · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You know your mouse pointer? You know, the one that changes to indicate what actions are available depending on what you're pointing at? They're icons too. Icons also take up significantly less space in a toolbar than text, and are much faster for the human eye to recognise. The world of icons is not restricted to what litters your desktop.

      Also real work does not always == coding. Icons indicating which tool you have selected in photoshop (for instance) are most definitely used for 'real work'.

    3. Re:Do you realize who this is? by martin-boundary · · Score: 2

      You know your mouse pointer? You know, the one that changes to indicate what actions are available depending on what you're pointing at? They're icons too. Icons also take up significantly less space in a toolbar than text, and are much faster for the human eye to recognise. The world of icons is not restricted to what litters your desktop.

      It's interesting you should mention that. Are icons really faster than text to recognize? I doubt it. Humans are trained to read text from the time we start school, and we're really good at it for most of us.

      In fact, I have no problem claiming we're better at it than recognizing icons. Here's an experiment for you to test this: Go to a Chinese takeaway (maybe not your regular one), and look at the menu. Read the words in English and on a blank piece of paper write down the dishes you remember. Now read the chinese characters, and on a blank piece of paper write down the ideograms you remember, and also the dishes they're associated with. I bet you do much better with the english text than with the chinese icons.

      So what's the point of this experiment? Obviously we're more used to text than icons in the western world, so why insist on using icons in computing instead of text? We should play up to our strengths, not go out of our way to makes things more difficult.

      Also real work does not always == coding. Icons indicating which tool you have selected in photoshop (for instance) are most definitely used for 'real work'.

      And as far as a palette or a ribbon of icons for choosing actions in an app like photoshop or word is concerned, let's review the facts where speed really matters: gaming. Do you see a lot of gamers who like to click on large palettes of dozens of icons during their games, or do they generally prefer pressing buttons on the keyboard to change functions when they need it? Gamers care about speed a lot more than photoshop users do, so if your point had merit, why do games continue to emphasize keyboard interfaces?

      I think icons sell computers, because they're novel and they look good in showrooms and adverts, and I suspect that's their main function in IT. It's an important function to be sure, since money's involved, but it's just marketing. Except for a few specialized applications, icons don't seem to *functionally* improve on text IMHO.

  7. Re:Icons are a waste of time by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

    Sure, iOs and Android is "nicer" but how long did you need to figure that the "sliders" on iOs to switch stuff on or off are no sliders but fancy looking radio buttons (or check boxes even). In other words: you can not slide them from off to on and vice versa, you have to click/touch them. Even worth: by looking at one you can not judge if it is in the on or off state. At least I mix them up all the time. Thinking an option is off (because it shows the neat little "o" to the left, and the slider is moved to the right) but in fact it is on (the little "o" is ment to indicate to move the slider to the left to switch it off. But that slider is no slider, ARRRRRRG!!!!)

    I don't know about you, but iOS has always put "On" and "Off" in the little toggles. They're done that way for two reasons. First, it's a larger surface to tap on (checkboxes can be painfully small). Second, its state is readable at a glance.

    I believe iOS also puts the "off" in a dimmed-grey while "on" is white-on-blue, making it more obvious what it means ("current state" rather than "this will be its new state when you tap me").

    So there's two clues, and it only took me a few seconds to figure it out. iOS 5 improved its readability even more by making the flipping part smaller so there's more space for "On" and "Off".

    I'm guessing you're complaining about Android, since the iOS toggle buttons can be tapped OR swiped since the beginning. In which case I can't really help you on that. (iOS has always said "On and Off" and never "o").

  8. History has the answers by Man+Eating+Duck · · Score: 2

    So, could computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?

    This is easy:

    If you want to give people a system that works for every Joe Sixpack and is shiny and easy to use, but costs more: Hire lots of artists and designers, use a proven bulletproof backend, and keep a few brilliant devs on hand. Easy interoperability between your company's devices is king.

    If you want to earn lots of money: Hire as many MBAs as you can get your hands on, put at least one of them in charge of each of your dev teams, and have an already established majority market share. Features before security and bugfixing is king.

    If you want to provide the best system available, but the user might have to work for it: Who needs designers and artists? Upload the source code of your OS to an ftp server and let crowdsourcing do the rest. RTFM is... not "king", who gives a shit anyway, but RTFM is the only way to reach 1337-ness.

    --
    Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors! :)
  9. causality. by mevets · · Score: 2

    I don't think having an MBA causes incompetence, but like moths to a flame, the talentless are so drawn.

  10. Re:Icons are a waste of time by tverbeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You simply don't know what the hell you're talking about. The normal human brain is very good a visual recognition of objects, and can find a familiar, distinctive icon for a program such as iTunes more quickly than it can find the word "iTunes". We recognize a red, hexagonal sign more quickly than we would recognize a white rectangle with black letters that read "stop". I'm sorry if the peculiarities of your brain development don't handle this properly, but don't begrudge the rest of us a UI that takes advantage of this.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  11. More BFAs (forget the MBAs) by tverbeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As someone with a BS in Computer Science and a BFA in Digital Media and Illustration, I'd certainly like to have more of the latter working in computing. Visual trainwrecks like the Windows XP Fisher-Price theme, usability disasters like Microsoft's game of "Where's The Button (and Menu)?" in every software upgrade in the last decade, and the less said about the uncanny valley that gaming has gotten lost in the better... sometimes make me want to quit tech and become an oil painter.

    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  12. Re:Icons by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Funny

    She was the first person to design icons ever?

    With the death of Steve Jobs, I believe we are going to see more early Mac artifacts like this one begin to emerge, forming the framework for what will be the fastest growing religion of the coming decade. File this one under, "Mac Nativity". Sketchbooks of ur-icons. Alchemical workbooks for the transmutation of blinking amber cursors into personal computers. Into the Macintosh.

    Do you remember the articles that came out every day after his death for more than two weeks? "The Last Words of Steve Jobs". "The Death of Steve Jobs" by his sister. "What Steve Jobs said about (cultural item here)". "The Early Days of Steve Jobs", "Steve Jobs the Lost Years", "Steve Jobs on the Road to Damascus" and "Steve Jobs rides into Jerusalem on the Back of an Ass". His great sacrifice of his own health so the Company can bring forth the iPhone 4S. His vision, his time in the wilderness and his rise and ultimate ascension. It's as predictable as the Perseids: this is the first 21st century faith. He even knocked the trial of the killer of that other mythical figure, Michael Jackson, out of the headlines for a solid month. Television programming was interrupted to make the solemn announcement. No mere text crawl could be sufficient.

    I'm setting the over/under on the first miracle performed in Steve Jobs' name at October, 2012.

    I am not joking.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  13. Susan Kare Demonstrating the Mac by Bluecobra · · Score: 3, Informative

    For all you computer history geeks out there, here is a clip from Computer Chronicles of Susan Kare demonstrating the Mac back in 1984:

    http://www.archive.org/details/Computer1984_3?start=772