Top 4 Quotes & Sayings by Susan Kare

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American graphic designer Susan Kare.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
Susan Kare

Susan Kare is an American artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. She was employee #10 and Creative Director at NeXT, the company formed by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in 1985. She was a design consultant for Microsoft, IBM, Sony Pictures, and Facebook, Pinterest and she is now an employee of Niantic Labs. As an early pioneer of pixel art and of the graphical computer interface, she has been celebrated as one of the most significant technologists of the modern world.

And with it all, good design's not about what medium you're working in, it's about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.โ€
People say graphic design is so different now, because you have so many more pixels and colors to work with... But when you study art history, you see there's just nothing new under the sun. Mosaics and needlework, it's all analogous to pixel and bitmap art. And with it all, good design's not about what medium you're working in, it's about thinking hard about what you want to do and what you have to work with before you start.
When you study art history, you learn that there is very little that is completely new, and in many ways digital art is no different. I love to derive inspiration from all types of images: mosaics, hieroglyphics, petroglyphs, woven patterns in textiles, and needlework. There is a lot of very good "pixel" design work before the 20th century, like a 1760 sampler by Elizabeth Laidman that looks like a bitmap font.
I don't use work from the past as a literal guide; rather, those artifacts reinforce a view that simple images can communicate with wide audiences over time. Icon design is like solving a puzzle, trying to marry an image and idea that, ideally, will be easy for people to understand and remember.
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