Steve Silberman revisits the work of Susan Kare, the artist tasked with creating fonts and a friendly interface for Apple:
[S]he mined ideas from everywhere: Asian art history, the geeky gadgets and toys that festooned her teammates’ cubicles, and the glyphs that Depression-era hobos chalked on walls to point the way to a sympathetic household. The symbol on every Apple command key to this day — a stylized castle seen from above — was commonly used in Swedish campgrounds to denote an interesting sightseeing destination. …
I asked Kare if she had any feeling at the time that the work she was doing at Apple 30 years ago would be so pervasively influential. "You can set out to make a painting, but you can’t set out to make a great painting," she told me. "If you look at that blank canvas and say, ‘Now I’m going to create a masterpiece’ — that’s just foolhardy. You just have to make the best painting you can, and if you’re lucky, people will get the message."
Silberman showcases some of Kare's original notebook drawings, which are featured in her self-published book Susan Kare Icons.
The Dish 