Susan Kare designed user-friendly icons for the first Macintosh (2019)

1984 "Computer Chronicles" segment of Susan Kare demoing the Mac, for anyone who hasn't seen it already (or who wants to watch it again, which you well might): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso

She also has a nice online store with signed prints (https://kareprints.com). I bought two a while ago and I still enjoy them, framed in my living room, every day.

Heh. I remember back in the mid/late 90s, a friend of mine (now my brother in law) spent 6 weeks or so contracting at Apple, and managed to pick me up a DogCow t-shirt that wasn't available except to Apple staff. My other Mac/Apple fanboy friends were _so_ jealous!

The Susan Kare icons, fonts, and visual design elements gave the original Macintosh a quirky visual charm that modern Apple systems and gadgets, slick as they may be, seem to lack.

Their design was/is deceptively simple - subtle and brilliant with a sense of fun.

All the original Mac bitmap fonts are beautiful. Monaco 9 is surprisingly legible at 1:1 resolution on my 4K monitor (though unfortunately Apple broke bitmap font rendering in Terminal on macOS Monterey.)

I don't know whether the Chicago font is original to the Mac, but I still see examples of it everywhere.

I remember being very impressed by these in the school's computer lab and trying to replicate the pixel art in the paint app.

I assume then she also worked with Tog.

Ah, the olden days when you made icons with hex constants and bitmap editors painting individual pixels.

Am I right in thinking she created the icons which is the end product but would have built the process and a whole business around it through her firm? That is super impressive. I would like to read more on that part of her career.

So I bought a big print of the famous Mac "hello" from Susan Kare's site [1]. It's very cool, she signed and numbered it.

But after I got it and stared at it for a while, I realized it's not the exact same as in the original commercials [2], but it is the same as in some old magazine ads [3] and the one they used for the iMac anniversary edition [4]. Recently, Apple updated the original design in high rez with rainbow colors in their recent brand refresh [5]. You can easily see the difference in the "h", which has a loop on one and is straight in the other.

I emailed Kare a few years ago and asked about the differences and she said she only remembers doing the one that's on her site and isn't sure where the other one came from.

I think I discovered an unknown Mac mystery!!

Here's my best guess at an Occam's Razor explanation: Susan created the original loopy hello. Later, some magazine artist was laying out the ad and decided to clean up the letters a little bit. Fast forward a decade and someone at Apple decides to use the hello for the iMac and grabs an old magazine to use as a template. Later still, Susan sets up her website and is collecting together her art and somehow ends up with the modified version, as around that time, that was the hello being advertised by Apple. Not noticing the subtle difference, she slapped it on the site without much thought. Even later, Apple decides to reintroduce the hello, but this time they did their research (or, more likely, the web exists now making it easier to find) and used the original as a template.

1. https://kareprints.com/products/hello-on-blue?_pos=2&_sid=28...

2. https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/29370-47319-000-3x2...

3. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/58/8a/9f/588a9fceb5a3b24cc582...

4. https://media.techeblog.com/images/apple-imac-g3-anniversary...

5. https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/04/Scree...