Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:18:32 · Susan Kare
So I thought maybe a sick Macintosh looks a little hungover. And again, I could be irreverent because no one was gonna see this, at least that's what I was told. Same thing with this icon. They needed an image for total system failure, which of course again no one would ever see. So I thought maybe it would be kind of funny to have a bomb like a Bugs Bunny type of bomb, but unfortunately people did see this. And one time I was working in the softer group was a glass room, the fishbowl, and the receptionist from the front said a call had come through to Apple from a person who really needed to talk to someone in the software group, not me, about her Macintosh because the caller was worried that she was looking at a bomb and was her computer going to explode. So I felt a little guilt. But the moral of the story is lots of iteration and we started with the handful of applications that we had. And so I did MacPaint first, I remember that, and I liked the idea that since it was a process, it looked kind of active, and then it could be paired with a document that resembled it. So our system was kind of a verb and a noun, and it seemed like this could hold up pretty well because we only had maybe half a dozen applications and didn't really have the mindset that there would be thousands of applications. Same with alerts, I tried to crop a person. It's not a person with a little square head. The idea is it's a crop so you don't know the gender or the age or the hairdo or really anything about this glimpse of a person. And I had only seen a SAN timer as an egg timer. It seemed like, Hey, we're in the 80s, let's update these things. We So made a watch cursor instead of an hourglass. This was the icon for print, and it's kind of a trap. ImageWriter did have paper with holes up the sides that would fit on the sprockets to attach when you turn the big knob on the side, but again too much detail. It would have had a much longer lifespan if I had just stopped and made it simpler. So in general, I think it's not good in icons to show pictures of a particular product design because like the three and a half inch floppy for save, even though there's still a few of those kicking around, but obviously it didn't age well. Better to use a metaphor. Just enough detail. So this is what our drop down menus looked like.
00:22:16 · Susan Kare
And we had the Apple, we called it the Apple menu, and there was an Apple, going to be an Apple key for these keyboard shortcuts. But Steve came in one day at the end of the day and said, You cannot do this. I think he called it an Apple farm and said, our logo is precious and we have to respect it. So, you know, we just can't have a bunch of apples. So then the idea was, I was told that that key was a command key or a feature key. And so I began thinking about commanding and it seemed kind of mean. The 10 Commandments seemed like a pun. So back to the library and I came across this image in a book that was called a feature. So I thought okay it kinda looks like a four leaf clover, that's sorta lucky. And it kinda looks like a clover leaf highway which might be a way to get somewhere fast. So we ended up, and it had the bonus of being really easy to draw in 16 by 16. So we used that and it's still on the keyboard, but I felt like a little bit bad that it didn't, it was abstract, and sometimes abstract things can be harder to remember, than something that has a metaphor that reinforces the concept. But I went to Sweden and I was so excited to get off the plane in Gothenburg and there's the feature key because it's used there to indicate that you're near, like for sightseeing, like a monument or something else. And someone from Sweden must have heard me comment on this and said, Actually, that symbol that's on the signs, Durai, is taken from a 1,200 AD castle called the Borgholm Castle and it's a ruin but when you see it from above you see that it's like a castle with four turrets and so that's actually what that symbol represents. So I thought it was fun to find out even after the fact it did look like something after all. And you know, you study art history, you know, there's not much new under the sun. People have been making little symbols for a long time, and no, I did not design this. Hieroglyphics had their day. This is a cartoon kind of showing that hieroglyphics are sort of back. And there's some really pretty nice bitmap fonts developed pretty long ago. This has only... It's like a seven pixel capital height. So I thought that was... I wish we had that person. And there's a lot of carvings with symbols and text and illustration that resembles some of the things that we were doing on the computer.
00:26:01 · Susan Kare
And again, like another extremely nice bitmap font two hundred plus years before we sat down to make our proportionally spaced fonts. Here's a very nice example. This has about a character height of like 10 pixels. And I realized that maybe I was destined or trained from a young age to wanna make things on a grid because it used to be acceptable to get little kits so your kids could make the parents an ashtray and I loved making this type of thing. And we... I like to think that there were emojis in the 1984 Macintosh that you could combine pictures with text before there was texting. And there's a few things hidden in here. It obviously had a hieroglyphic antecedent and I hid some hieroglyphic type symbols in there. But I think the whole point of that project and the graphics was it isn't really just about a grid of pixels, it's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything. So this is just a super quick run through of some icon options that I did for Swatch and they wanted an alarm. So of course I started with a clock and made it noisier and then made it look a little bit more literal and then a little louder and simpler maybe. Or maybe it should look like, oh, it's a travel alarm clock, would be in your head if you saw this. And then I thought, way too self referential, why would you want a clock on a clock? So I was making other things that looked a little bit noisy as options and like the alpha alarm clock. The point just being this is so not an exact science, and I always like to show either what a client asks for or what a programmer might have used as a placeholder because I've gotten so many good ideas that way and then maybe refine them a little bit. But after I worked at Apple, I did a job for Microsoft on Windows 3.0 and color, even if 16 colors, and some of them weren't very good colors, but it was still so nice to to be have, able to use red for alerts and to differentiate at a glance a little easier when you had color as another option. And I wanted to make something that didn't look like a garish chessboard, you know, there were a lot of illustrations like that. So this is all those 16 colors but dithered so that they appear a little more subtle. And I also did something that I guess there's always a way to get addicted to something on your screen and in the 90s a lot of people played solitaire.
00:29:48 · Susan Kare
I had to take it off my computer so I didn't play too much and slate at the time thought that solitaire made a dent. And I'm just gonna show a few images that I made in the decades after Apple and before, some examples of good advice that I wanted to share with you. So I've worked for a lot of clients and we're not gonna talk about them all. And I feel so grateful. Again, things that were fun and some things that were serious and some things that wanted self consciously to seem like business. But I worked on a project for General Magic. I did the logo and we had a different kind of desktop metaphor that was a little more literal and hallways with doors. And I think the very worst thing we had was jars of text, because why? But the idea was that you could remember where things were by going and finding them in a logical way, and I kind of laugh, wince, like all these things are gone, like no Rolodexes, no phones that looked like that, but at the time, yeah, no file cabinets. I mean, there still are file cabinets, but at the time, you could tap on those drawers and they would come out and you could put whatever you wanted in there. And that was kind of a fun project that just didn't... We could send postcards, but it didn't quite anticipate email. I worked for Facebook on a project that you couldn't just upload images, but you could buy images for a dollar, like a real dollar and send them to people. So I thought this was a wonderful project of kind of having a gift shop and what could you draw that someone would want enough either to have or to share with someone that it was worth spending a dollar on. So we did this for not quite four years and had a new gift every day that launched at midnight on the East Coast. And we could kind of tell by maybe quarter after if it was gonna be a successful bestseller by just how many sold in that first fifteen minutes. And we had some limited editions and we had some, I thought maybe if you made something that cost thousands of dollars, like diamond earrings and a Rolex and did fancy things, that it would seem more worth a dollar because it was so expensive. But what I learned was that cute trumped everything.
00:33:17 · Susan Kare
Teddy bears, anything heart shaped, the kiss mark was the best seller of all time, And I would say if my life depended on selling a drawing for a dollar, I now know I would draw a penguin because we had multiple limited editions of penguins and they all sold out. But it was just interesting. We did some collabs with Britney Spears and other entertainers. And ultimately, Facebook ended this program because they didn't wanna compete with third parties, but it was good while it lasted. Then I did some icons for Pinterest where a terrific animator helped me with these. I thought just a little bit of motion so that it wouldn't get really irritating over time. And I made many icons there. This isn't all for Pinterest, but some of them were. I made a logo for a stealthmill.com, which terrific company, but before they had their real logo, we did a trash panda. And thought like because it dealt with trash in a similar way. And this is an illustration, The National, which is Amtrak's magazine, invites artists, I think it's a quarterly magazine, and they have artists interpret their route map, so I thought it might be fun to go back and do pixelated icons for places where you could take the train. And I love doing logos. This is for magic puzzle, which really does make these great jigsaw puzzles that then after you finish, they perform a magic trick, not levitating. But I was an artist doing studies for the logo, which is pretty close to this for a Pikmin Bloom game and Peridot, which is a game, and love doing avatars. Just kind of, avatars are so freeing because they can stand for anything, So it like kind of made me feel like gifts, you just wanna have an array that someone can find something that speaks to them. And I just did these badges for a fairly new Ledger crypto wallet, and it has a little attachment opening in the front so that you can personalize it, and they really wanted to have something a little bit retro looking. And this is a logo for a VC firm where the idea is get out of the office and work in the mountains, work somewhere outdoors was the idea of this. And Dave Moran, a friend called and said, on a Friday, I think, and wanted to have an image in t shirts and hats like by Monday. So kind of a quickie project, but it was fun to get to have a little bit of experience with something that was new.
00:37:02 · Susan Kare
And now, I wanted to share some advice that I've been given by people that I met. It's not a Google project and I'm always looking to add to it. So I welcome any good advice that you wanna send along by people that really influenced me. And this Paul Rand I mentioned earlier, just a terrific designer who started working, I think, for magazines when he was around 15, and he said that he was kind of like, all this stuff with all these new fonts, it's like you don't need that many, he was kind of brusque, you don't need that many fonts, you just have to know how to use them well. And this is some of his work. I got to work with him at a company called Next where Steve Jobs went after he had to leave Apple, and I of course wanted to hire Paul Rand for the logo because he was my hero, And Steve hadn't really heard of him, and he thought we should have a contest, like probably, which I would never think is the best way to get good creative, but he said we could hire five people or firms and pay them each 15 ks and then we would pick the best and continue to work with them. So I invited some people and then I invited Paul Rand and he said, You will pay me a $100,000. I will do one logo and you will like it. And that is actually what happened and we did like it and we did pay him and it was such a great learning experience for everybody to work with him. Among other advice he gave me, these are the fonts that he tended to use a lot, And I noticed in his work, he also tends to use the same colors. And I kinda thought, okay, if PMS three fifty four green is good enough for Paul Rand, it's good enough for me. And I still tend to look in his books and use some of the colors that he recommended for next. He did, just as an offhand remark, say that. But when we were talking about logos, he really advocated trying hard to think of a way to do something to the name of the product, kind of the way he put next in the cube. He showed this as what not to do. This is a couple AT and T logos ago because he said, If you can spend a ton of money to make some random symbol associated that doesn't really mean anything much, I mean, I guess it's the world, with your logo. You can do whatever you want, but most people don't have unlimited money.