The Mac Command Key Was a Swedish Campsite Sign

Steve Jobs walked into a 1983 meeting and told the team that the Apple logo would not be on the keyboard. He had seen a mock-up where the command shortcut was indicated by a small Apple, and his complaint was simple: the logo would appear next to every menu item, on screen and on the keys, and it would cheapen the brand. Find another symbol.

The job landed with Susan Kare. She was 28, had a PhD in sculpture from NYU, and had been hired earlier that year by her high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld in trade for an Apple II. Her business card read 'Macintosh Artist'. She had been drawing the Mac's icons and fonts in 32x32 pixel grids on a graph-paper notebook that cost her two-fifty.

For the command-key glyph she pulled an international-symbol reference book off a library shelf and found a small four-lobed cloverleaf used on Swedish road and campsite signage to mark a 'sevardhet' — a place of interest, often a heritage site. It is sometimes called the Saint Hannes cross. Drivers in Sweden know it the way Americans know a brown road sign. It had no semantic baggage in software, it was readable at low resolution, and it fit a key cap.

Kare drew it. The Mac shipped in January 1984. The cloverleaf has sat next to QWERTY on every Apple keyboard since. The icon book is forgotten; the campsite glyph travels around the world a billion times a day on people typing Cmd-S.