Susan Kare’s Sketchbook

If you’ve never heard of Susan Kare, then you really should take a look at this piece by Steve Silberman at NeuroTribes. Susan designed the graphic user interface icons for the original Macintosh, then went on to work on IBM’s OS/2, Windows, and even Facebook. She’s the reason we all recognize the trash can on a computer desktop and the speaker volume icon on a keyboard, as well as the “pan hand” for navigating PDFs and the scissors for cut and paste. If that wasn’t enough, she even designed the first proportionally spaced font for computers, finally moving us beyond the monospaced style used on typewriters. Combined with Steve Jobs’ obsession with calligraphy, it’s no stretch to say that her work made the desktop publishing industry possible.