Born: 1954

Susan Kare is an American artist and graphic designer best known for creating many of the original interface elements for the Apple Macintosh in the 1980s. She is widely recognised as a pioneer of pixel art and one of the most influential designers in the history of personal computing. 

Kare graduated from Harriton High School in 1971, earned a BA in Art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, and completed an MA and PhD in Fine Arts at New York University in 1978. She then moved to San Francisco, where she worked for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

In the early 1980s, she was recruited to Apple by her high‑school friend Andy Hertzfeld. Kare joined the original Macintosh team as the 'Macintosh Artist', designing many of the system’s icons, typefaces, and user‑interface graphics. She used her experience designing mosaics, needlepoint embroidery and fine art to create the icons, sketching them by hand onto graph paper. Her playful, minimalist style shaped the friendly look of the Macintosh’s icon-based interface and helped make the computer easy to use. 

Her most famous creations include the Chicago, Geneva, and Monaco typefaces; Clarus the Dogcow; the Happy Mac; the Command Key symbol; and icons such as the Lasso, Grabber, and Paint Bucket. Her work defined the visual language of the Macintosh and helped introduce graphical computing to the mainstream.

After leaving Apple in 1985, Kare became one of the first employees at NeXT, serving as its Creative Director. She later worked as an independent designer for companies including Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and others. At Microsoft she designed the Solitaire card deck and many icons for Windows 3.0; for IBM she created icons for OS/2; and for Eazel she contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager. 

Kare’s work has been exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, and she continues to be celebrated for her foundational role in shaping modern user‑interface design.