Susan Kare (/kɛər/ "care"; born February 5, 1954) is an American artist and graphic designer, who contributed interface elements and typefaces for the first Apple Macintosh personal computer from 1983 to 1986.

[11][12][10] Because she did not attend an artist training school, she built her experience and portfolio by taking many pro-bono graphics jobs such as posters and brochure design in college, holiday cards, and invitations.

[7] 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.

[10][5] He suggested that she get a US$2.50 grid notebook[5][17] of the smallest graph paper she could find at the University Art store in Palo Alto[18] and mock up several 32 × 32 pixel representations of his software commands and applications.

[15][14] Compelled to actually join the team for a fixed-length part-time job,[7] she interviewed "totally green" but undaunted, bringing a variety of typography books from the Palo Alto public library to show her interest[14] alongside her well-prepared notebook.

[5] She preferred it over the Apple II[7] and was amazed and excited by the computer screen's design capability to undo, redo, and iterate an icon or letterform while seeing it simultaneously at enlarged and 100% target sizes.

[5] She immediately embraced Bill Atkinson's existing rudimentary graphics software tools and applications, to toggle pixels on and off and convert the resulting images to hexadecimal code for keyboard input.

[5] As a whole platform of their own, these designs comprise the first visual language for the identity of the Macintosh and for Apple's pioneering of graphical user interface (GUI) computing.

[24] She refined Apple's existing iconography and desktop metaphors imported from the Macintosh's predecessor, the Lisa,[14] such as the trash can, dog-eared paper icon, and I-beam cursor.

[7][13][10] Aligned with Steve Jobs's passion for calligraphy,[18] she designed the world's first proportionally spaced digital font family[10] including Chicago and Geneva, and the monospaced Monaco.

Chicago is her first font, made especially for systemwide use in menus and dialog; it has a bold vertical look initially named Elefont,[5] in which Kare implemented Jobs's idea of variable spacing, where each character can have the unique pixel width that it needs, to differentiate the computer from a monospaced typewriter.

[6] She realized that she wanted "to be back doing bitmaps"[7] so she left NeXT to become an independent designer with a client base including graphical computing giants Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, Motorola, General Magic, and Intel.

[5][1][13] Her projects for Microsoft include the card deck for Windows 3.0's solitaire game,[26][27] which taught early computer users to use a mouse to drag and drop objects on a screen.

[1][14][10] For Eazel, she rejoined many from the former Macintosh team and contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager which the company permanently donated to the public for free use.

"[27] She said "good icons should function somewhat like traffic signs—simple symbols with few extraneous details, which makes them more universal"[44] and notes that there is no impetus to continuously modernize a stop sign.

[45] Using the same philosophy through the pixel art era and beyond, she has placed a "premium on context and metaphor", hunting the streets of San Francisco for inspiration from "catchy symbols and shapes".

[10] When stuck on a design, she resourced inspiration from the books Kanji Pictograms for its table of the real-world origins of Japanese characters, and Symbol Sourcebook,[46] especially its reference for hobo graffiti.

[10] She intended to bring "an artist's sensibility to a world that had been the exclusive domain of engineers and programmers" and "hoped to help counter the stereotypical image of computers as cold and intimidating".

[14] Her Macintosh icons were inspired by many sources such as art history, wacky gadgets, pirate lore, Japanese logograms, and forgotten hieroglyphics.

For example, her original fonts are constrained to 9 × 7 pixels per character, yet she solved the problem of the typical jagged look of existing monospaced computer typefaces by using only horizontal, vertical, or 45-degree lines.

[14] In 2015, the Museum of Modern Art exhibited the first physical representation of her iconography, including her original Grid sketchbook,[19] saying "If the Mac turned out to be such a revolutionary object––a pet instead of a home appliance, a spark for the imagination instead of a mere work tool––it is thanks to Susan's fonts and icons, which gave it voice, personality, style, and even a sense of humor.

"[48] The American Institute of Graphic Arts characterized her style as a "whimsical charm and an independent streak" with an "artistic sleight of hand" and awarded her with its medal in April 2018.

[11] On International Women's Day of 2018, Medium acknowledged Kare as a technologist who helped shape the modern world alongside programmer Ada Lovelace, computer scientist Grace Hopper, and astronaut Mae Jemison.

[48] Susan Kare is considered a pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical user interface,[50] having spent three decades of her career "at the apex of human-machine interaction".

Her most recognizable and enduring works at Apple include the world's first proportionally spaced digital font family of the Chicago, Geneva, and Monaco typefaces, and countless icons and interface components such as the Lasso, the Grabber, and the Paint Bucket.