Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac

Kare joined Apple to improve the Macintosh’s fonts and graphics, aiming to make the computer friendly and understandable without a manual. Early icons had to fit a 16-by-16 black-and-white grid, so she treated those limits as useful creative constraints.

For the startup screen, Kare designed Happy Mac to reassure users while the computer booted. She favored a few salient details that let people recognize and interpret an image, and noted that her bomb icon for system failure worried at least one user. She also pointed to the paper-with-sprocket-holes printer icon as an example of detail that could make an image age poorly.

Kare described refining icons through repeated options, including a watch cursor and the Command key symbol. She considered how metaphors could make an icon clearer, while acknowledging that the Command symbol’s abstract shape was easy to draw but harder to connect to its meaning. At Swatch, she developed several alarm icon options rather than treating the first idea as final.

After Apple, Kare worked on Windows 3.0, General Magic, Facebook, Pinterest, and other projects. She found that color helped distinguish Windows alerts, and that cute drawings such as teddy bears and kiss marks sold well in Facebook’s paid gift program. Her advice from collaborators included making ideas visual, allowing extra time, and helping users feel capable.