susan kare is the queen of icons

susan kare made digital history. the macintosh bomb... she's the inventor of thousands of icons .....................................................................................

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susan kare's biography

susan kare,
after receiving a doctorate in fine arts from
new york university in 1978, she moved to the
san francisco area to first work briefly as an
assistant curator at the fine arts museums of
san francisco, then as a freelance graphic artist.
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her career in user interface graphic design
began when she worked for apple computer
between 1983 and 1986.
with the introduction of the macintosh in 1984,
apple pushed the world toward the graphic interface,
which provides greater ease of use.
a graphic interface allows an operator to control
the computer by manipulating symbols displayed
on its monitor, usually with a mouse or trackball.
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she left with steve jobs to become creative
director at NeXT inc.
after two years there, she began to freelance for
companies such as microsoft. she did many of the
icons for windows 3.0.
(which was microsoft's first successful attempt to
reproduce a macintosh-like experience on
IBM-compatible personal computers.)
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in 1989, she was a founding partner of
susan kare LLP.
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during the past years, she has drawn more
than 2,000 icons for computers,
coming up with dozens of symbols representing
the commands ‘print’, ‘merge’ and ‘quit’.
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her clients have included the leaders of the
computer age:
apple, the getty technology group, intel,
IBM, sony pictures, yahoo, AT&T, motorola
autodesk, eazel inc., microsoft...
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she is a 2001 recipient of the chrysler design award.

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susan kare
photo courtesy chrysler design awards