All right, this is a stretch. But not much of one, and here’s why: once upon a time, computers were dreadfully unfriendly compared to today. They were controlled by flipping series of switches and eventually by text-heavy command lines; it was only a matter of time before icons, which were an intriguing repurposing of hieroglyphs, made their debut as visual capabilities evolved.

Photo by iSani

Enter Susan Kare. Zealously believing that every pixel matters, she was the primary creator of the original icon set for the Mac in 1983, sowing the seeds for a mass icon evolution in the years to come. If you’ve ever used a modern GUI, you’ve seen either Kare’s work or design influenced by it. Not satisfied with that, Kare went on to create many more influential pieces of pixelart: perhaps you’ve seen the cards in Windows Solitaire? Or, in more recent times, the Facebook graphics adorning many Facebook gifts?

Like Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire,” Kare’s work is known by millions of more people than those who know the artist’s name. Smashing Magazine has featured numerous compilations of great icons that draw on Kare’s style: nowadays, they’re enhanced by a variety of glammy 3D effects and soft shading, but undeniably, their lineage can be traced back to this one designer.

Never one to lack a sense of humor, Susan is also behind such computing in-jokes as Clarus the Dogcow, which are elegant in their simplicity and eloquent in the reactions they elicit:

Photo by Seb Payne

Kare’s vast yet understated influence extends to typefaces too: ever seen pixelfonts, which have seen increasing waves of popularity over the last stretch of years? In a bitmapped time before PostScript and OpenType, Kare made some of the first computer fonts. And consistent with her propensity to be prolific, she designed such time-tested classics as Chicago, which would see a resurgence in the first iPods:

Photo by FHKE

If you’re going “Wow! I’d better learn more about Susan Kare,” you should, and Folklore.org has a dozen great stories about how other work she contributed to came to be.

Continuing onwards, Kare’s done work for the Web appliance Chumby, and it remains to be seen if this will be looked on as fondly in hindsight as the rest of her canon. In the meantime, you can find impressive tributes to her craft, such as this nod to the original Mac stopwatch/waiting icon:

Photo by krazydad / jbum

Calligraphic foresight: Steve Jobs

“The whole duty of typography, as of calligraphy, is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be communicated by the author.” – Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson

True to the above statement, the Mac (and Apple) wouldn’t have happened without Steve Jobs. As an exemplar, along with Jonathan Ive, of the marriage of form and function, he’s already synonymous with many other benchmarks in the technology industries, and Macs continue to be popular among creative designers.

It’s surprising now, but back then it wasn’t important that computers have beautiful typography. Strongly regarded as matter-of-fact business machines before being appreciated as extensions of our imagination, computers had limited resolution and other technical constraints that discouraged even slight efforts for more flexible type. It’s even amusing that, having the plethora of choices that we do today, some intentionally want to recreate the rigid, monospaced MS-DOS look.

Thankfully for us, as he boldly recounts in his Stanford commencement address, Jobs noticed that Reed College, which he attended, had gorgeous penmanship everywhere he looked. Consequently, he took a calligraphy class and learned the language of type. And even years later, when it was an unlikely application of his then-theoretical knowledge, he nevertheless pushed this desire and passion on the Macintosh. The big question he answered: “What if computers could have beautiful typesetting as we do on paper?”

Photo by treviño

It seems so natural now. Fonts, including many quality freebies, flourish. Easier ways of editing them, such as FontStruct (a brilliant “gateway” promotional tool for FontShop), have lowered the barrier to type hobbyists. Today, we find it shocking if a creative application doesn’t allow us to choose from different fonts — unless it’s expressly built not to allow them. With Jobs, as with Kare, hindsight once again comes very much into play.

It’s been worth it, even if some of what’s cropped up has looked awkward: