'I worked with Andy Hertzfeld chiefly, but also with everyone in the software group,' she says. The fact they have only recently suffered 'eviction from the Apple desktop' is a tribute to the clarity Kare instantly brought to the task.Īlthough Steve Jobs had the ultimate say on which icons made the final cut, Kare says that the process wasn't overtly controlled. The pouring paint can, the watch, the bomb - every one of those icons hits the nail on the head. 'We were trying to create a set of familiar images so that their meanings could help the na¯ve user,' says Kare.
Her trick? To think of icons more like road signs than illustrations, something Kare has continued in her current work for handheld devices. 'There weren't any existing icons,' she explains, 'just words in boxes.' So to complete the task, Kare placed the emphasis on what she terms 'economy of expression' - the need for an icon to convey its meaning in a single glance. When Kare started work at Macintosh, interface design was in its infancy.
