Susan Kare (born February 5, 1954) is an American artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. She was employee #10 and Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. She was a design consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, and Facebook, and she is now an employee of Pinterest. As an early pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant technologists of the modern world. Kare was born in Ithaca, New York. Her father was a professor at Penn State and director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a research facility for the senses of taste and smell. Her mother taught her counted-thread embroidery as she immersed herself in drawings, paintingsand crafts. Her brother was aerospace engineer Jordin Kare. She graduated from Harriton High School in 1971. She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975, with an undergraduate honors thesis on sculpture. She received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in fine arts from New York University in 1978 with a doctoral dissertation on "the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honoré Daumier and Claes Oldenburg". Her goal was "to be either a fine artist or teacher.” In 1982, Kare was welding a life-sized razorback hog sculpture commissioned by an Arkansas museum when she received a phone call from high school friend Andy Hertzfeld. In exchange for an Apple II computer, he solicited her to hand-draw a few icons and font elements to inspire the upcoming Macintosh computer. However, she had no experience in computer graphics and "didn't know the first thing about designing a typeface" or pixel art so she drew heavily upon her fine art experience in mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism. He suggested that she get a US$2.50 grid notebook of the smallest graph paper she could find at the University Art store in Palo Alto and mock up several 32 × 32 pixel representations of his software commands and applications. This includes an icon of scissors for the "cut" command, a finger for "paste", and a paintbrush for MacPaint. Compelled to actually join the team for a fixed-length part time job, she interviewed "totally green" but undaunted, bringing a variety of typography books from the Palo Alto public library to show her interest alongside her well-prepared notebook. She "aced" the interview and was hired in January 1983 with Badge #3978. Her business cards read "HI Macintosh Artist". Sources · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare · https://kare.com · https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-woman-who-gave-the-macintosh-a-smile