Susan Kare’s original Mac icon designs go on show in New York

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Fast Company/Susan Kare
Susan Kare helped define the personality of the Macintosh. Photo: Fast Company/Susan Kare
Photo: Fast Company/Susan Kare

As the artist responsible for the famous icons used for the original Macintosh, Susan Kare played an immensely important role in personal computer history. A new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York pays homage to the queen of pixel art — while giving Mac fans a chance to see Kare’s original graph paper designs in the process.

Called “This is for Everyone: Design Experiments For The Common Good” (the name comes from a phrase from World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee), the exhibition also features other classic bits of computer iconography, including @ symbol, Google Maps Pin and the Creative Commons logo.

Kare wasn’t the first person to design icons for a graphical user interface, but she helped convey a lot of the approachability and friendliness of the original Mac, while helping to create many of the metaphors (scissors for cutting, for instance) which seem second nature to us today, but were strikingly new in the 1980s.

The “This is for Everyone” exhibition is open at MOMA in New York until January 2016: meaning that you’ve got plenty of time to check it out. More information about it can be found here. You can also check out some of Kare’s original designs on graph paper below.

Via: i-programmer

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