Apple design icon Susan Kare joins Pinterest

Kare, who designed the typefaces and icon sets for the original Mac OS, is joining Pinterest to work on product design.

Portrait by Anne Rhoney
Portrait by Anne Rhoney

Graphic designer Susan Kare, who was one of Apple’s first employees and created icons, graphics and typefaces for the original Mac operating system, is joining Pinterest as a product design lead.

Kare will join Pinterest’s creative team, with Pinterest chief executive and co-founder Evan Sharp saying: “As one of the small group of people who helped invent and popularise the graphical user interface, Susan’s contributions to this industry are immeasurable.

Sharp adds: “More exciting for us, though, are her current and future contributions at Pinterest. We’re always looking for that rare intersection of talent and humility.”

Kare says: “From the first time I met Evan Sharp and [Pinterest head of product design] Bob Baxley, I felt in sync with the Pinterest design philosophy and company vision.

“I’m looking forward to working with such a passionate design team; the talent pool at Pinterest is impressive, and I’m excited to get started.”

Kare joined Apple in 1982 and worked on a series of graphics, icons and typefaces. Among her creations are the “Happy Mac” start-up icon, the Chicago typeface used in the original Mac OS and “Clarus the Dogcow” – used in the Mac OS page setup dialogue boxes.

Kare left Apple to join Steve Jobs at NeXT. She also worked on projects for Microsoft and IBM – designing the card decks for Windows 3.0’s solitaire game and icons for a number of the OS’s control panels.

In 2003 she was one of the co-founders of media company Mode Media and she has also been running her own digital design studio Kare, based in San Francisco.

Kare also runs the Kare Prints website, which sells a number of her classic icon designs in limited-edition print form.

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  • RitaSue Siegel August 4, 2015 at 4:02 pm

    Thanks so much for this video of Susan Kare. She has always been one of my heros. At least 20 years ago, I featured her in an innovations article in a DMI (Design Management Institute) publication.

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