How Susan Kare Drew the First Macintosh on Graph Paper

In January 1983, Apple hired a 28-year-old artist named Susan Kare to design icons and fonts for a project called Macintosh. Kare had a doctorate in fine art, had been sculpting on commission, and had taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. She had never worked in computer graphics. The business card she had printed for herself read "Macintosh Artist."

The icons she made for the original Mac, which shipped in January 1984, are still in use as design references. The smiling computer that greets you at boot. The trash can. The watch cursor that means waiting. The paint bucket. The lasso. The pointing-hand icon. The bomb that came up when the system crashed. The Command-key clover, lifted from a Swedish road-sign symbol for an interesting site.

Kare worked on a 32-by-32 pixel grid. She bought a notebook of the smallest graph paper she could find at the University Art store in Palo Alto for $2.50 and laid each icon out by filling in squares with a pencil. Her reference points were not earlier computer graphics — there were almost none — but mosaics, needlepoint, and cross-stitch. "Bitmap graphics," she has said, "are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practised before going to Apple."

The constraint was the medium. A 32-pixel square has 1,024 cells, each of them either on or off. The artist's job was to make the result legible at thumbnail size and unambiguous in meaning. Kare spent days on the trash can, weeks on the bomb.

She left Apple in 1986 to design icons for Microsoft Windows 3.0, IBM OS/2, and later Facebook's gift shop. The trash she drew at Apple in 1983 is still on every Mac.