Guest Curator Ariana Vilchis

early digital interfaces and typefaces

Susan Kare's early icon designs for Apple and Ladislas Mandel's test print for Lusitania Typeface

Who designed these iconic bits of imagery? Susan Kare is responsible for many of the classic icons that Apple used. The dimensions of early personal computers maxed out at a few hundred pixels. Her icon sketches for an interview at Apple exemplify the thought process of a designer working within that small grid. She succeeded at representing countless actions and meanings with her bitmap drawings. I wonder how she figured it out. A day will come when designers must once again deconstruct a new technology to produce more symbols and ways to communicate with the world.

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