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taking a brief moment to crush on Susan Kare. as NeXT employee #10, she invented many GUI elements and iconographies that we take for granted today. and she invented Monaco, one of my favorite fonts, alongside Chicago, San Francisco, and Geneva. oh yeah, and Clarus the Dogcow. 103 comments
@JSkier Monaco (with some modern refinements) has aged beautifully, very good programming font.  @april As seen in my favorite piece of art hanging in my office (signed print from Susan). @sharding Extremely good. I’ve been considering getting a Dogcow tattoo. Although maybe the modern adaption. Not sure. @april @sharding @collin It's at the bottom of this page: https://512pixels.net/dogcow/ @april Some of the street name signs on stop lights in the city I live in are based on the Chicago font. I nerd out excitedly when I see them, my kids don't get it 😀  @april iirc she also drew the icons for macos 1, windows 3.0 and the cards for windows solitaire! @april I worked with Susan back at Chumby, got to meet her once, she's legend. Little known fact, she created our beloved 6 legged corporate mascot, secretly known as the sexapus.    I was thinking that the design elements April mentions, including Clarus, were part of the Mac ecosystem. NeXT was always PostScript based, wasn't it? So all the bitmapped type and graphics would have been otiose.  @baruch she went to NeXT after being at Apple. The two companies were quite close iirc. @april totally unrelated but Monaco, Roquebrune and Beausoleil is just next to where I grew up and this appeared in my timeline right now. Also unrelated, huge NeXT fan, especially of NeXTSTEP, the best and most beautiful operating system ever. I've learned something new! @april she is cool, no doubt. And we should be thankful for her work. But it’s weird for me how in the western culture, we like to use the word "invention" to refer to the work in a team. Like recently, people talk about a guy who "invented" dynamic island. Hard no! It doesn’t work like that in companies. It is always teamwork. It always contribution and collective effort, never personal invention. @constantine I mean, in a small company back in the day this was literally a singular person’s work. @april I understand. And even in a team of 20 people, there is an art direction, collaboration, and work of others, which everyone uses as a foundation for their work. Again, no doubt she made a significant contribution not just to the company back then but also to our industry overall. Mad respect @constantine suuuuuure but there’s a huge difference between the dynamic island with its huge team and someone doing 99% of the work with a bit of feedback from their teammates. she basically made all of these things that needed to be made and they were like yup looks great let’s ship it.  @april @constantine   @april Inspiring woman, and I like the picture of her you used in your post very much. I‘m still so in love with these prints 🥰 So far I could resist because of the price… https://kareprints.com/  And much of the graphics/artwork for the original Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and others, too!  @april @kieran IIRC she also did a number of designs for Microsoft, including the Windows Solitaire card designs? A great reminder of how women in tech are awesome, though — and not just in “design” or non-technical roles. (Also, don’t forget Anette Wagner, who worked on the Lisa and had a *huge* impact on how outline typefaces work!) @april Met her in Jan. 1984 when she stopped by and helped me demo the Mac on its first day in the market in Macy's SF. @april But all the important NeXT GUI elements came from Xerox Parc in 1970s. As did those on Gem, Amiga, Lisa/Mac, Windows. Now OS GUIs are getting broken in an attempt to be "Modern". @raymccarthy @april Bruce Horn claims that many major GUI elements were invented by Apple after seeing Smalltalk, including drag-and-drop file manipulation, menu bar and pull-down menus, clipboard, “self-repairing” windows, and others. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox%2C_Apple_and_Progress.txt has details. @april Hard to believe that Susan Kare is 69 years old now. And accomplished all of this while fighting off horny coder man-boys with no social skills.  @april Note that she designed the original San Francisco font, not the font of the same name in current macOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_(decorative_typeface) @april I think I have used Monaco more than any other font in my life. Quite thankful.  @april So, fun fact: Susan Kare is also from Philly! Once on her Twitter feed, she recounted the story behind the famous Apple fonts, and she noted she originally named them after towns on the Philadelphia Main Line. Apparently Steve Jobs heard the names and said something to the effect of "Susan, no one will remember those names, you need to name them after big cities." Even though I'm sad a bit of #Philly didn't make it into Apple lore, I think Steve was ultimately correct.   @april She also designed a bunch of icons for early versions of GNOME's file manager Nautilus. This was while working for Eazel: a company started by a bunch of ex-Apple people to work on Nautilus. @albertkinng @april i think AI is going to be transformative. but i don’t think it will fundamentally alter what a computer can do or how we use them in the same way that moving from command line to GUI did. or when we moved to smartphones. both of those changes fundamentally altered who could use a computer, when they used it, and what they could do with it. i don’t see any changes like that coming any time soon. we need a new Steve Jobs and we need to dump Elon Musk. @april and maaaany years later she and I figured out how to operate a particularly complicated espresso machine at Pinterest. Definitely old-school cool.  @april I thought those fonts were just ripoffs of others, like Geneva was just an unlicensed Helvetica.  @april Not belittling anyone's achievements as this is awesome...however, I could not care any less about fonts. @beingextorted without fonts you’d be typing into nothing, which I assume is what you did here. "Not to belittle" --> "I'm about to belittle the shit outta this" It boggles my mind why someone would comment on something that "they couldn't care any less" about when the most expeditious thing would be to not comment at all. |
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@april I still love those fonts and use them today 😀
She still sells her art:
https://kareprints.com/collections/all