Early Susan Kare's career has always focused on fine art. Because she did not attend an artist training school, she built her experience and portfolio by taking many pro-bono graphics jobs such as posters and brochure design in college, holiday cards, and invitations. as sculptor and occasional curator. However, she had no experience in computer graphics and "didn't know the first thing about designing a typeface" or
pixel art and mock up several representations of his software commands and applications. She "aced" the interview and was hired in January 1983 with Badge #3978. Her business cards read "Macintosh Artist". She and
Steve Capps sewed a
Jolly Roger pirate flag with a rainbow colored Apple logo eyepatch, as the christening brand of the new Macintosh headquarters at Bandley 3, embracing
Steve Jobs' ethos "it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy". for the original Macintosh OS () Chicago is her first font, made especially for systemwide use in menus and dialog; it has a bold vertical look initially named Elefont,
Smithsonian Magazine summarizes her groundbreaking Macintosh work: "It was an intense time with untold pressure to perform on a new product launch that demanded countless hours of work, rework and work again to get everything right." Kare recalled the privilege of being directly taught by engineers how early software is assembled: She introduced Jobs to her design hero
Paul Rand and hired him to design NeXT's logo and brand identity, admiring his table-pounding exactitude and confidence. which taught early computer users to use a mouse to drag and drop objects on a screen. In 1987, she designed a "baroque" wallpaper, For General Magic, she made
Magic Cap's "impish" cartoon of dad's office desktop. In 2003, she became a member of the advisory board of Glam Media, now called
Mode Media. In 2003, she was recommended by
Nancy Pelosi as one of four appointments to the
Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee for designing coins for the
United States Mint. Between 2006 and 2010, she produced hundreds of icons for the virtual gifts feature of
Facebook. One of the gift icons, titled "Big Kiss" is featured in some versions of
Mac OS X as a user account picture. In 2007, she designed the identity, icons, and website for
Chumby Industries, Inc., as well as the interface for its Internet-enabled alarm clock. Since 2008, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) store in
New York City has carried stationery and notebooks featuring her designs. In 2015, MoMA acquired her notebooks of sketches for the original Macintosh user interface. In 2015, Kare was hired by
Pinterest as a product design lead as her first corporate employment in three decades. In February 2021, Kare became Design Architect at
Niantic Labs. , she concurrently heads a digital design practice in San Francisco and sells limited-edition, signed fine-art prints. Using the same philosophy through the pixel art era and beyond, she has placed a "premium on context and metaphor", hunting the streets of San Francisco for inspiration from "catchy symbols and shapes". especially its reference for
hobo graffiti. using a grid-like template to simulate the constraints of the target device and user experience. They called her "a pioneering and influential computer iconographer [whose icon designs] communicate their function immediately and memorably, with wit and style." In October 2019, Kare was awarded the
National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement by
Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. On
International Women's Day of 2018,
Medium acknowledged Kare as a technologist who helped shape the modern world alongside programmer
Ada Lovelace, computer scientist
Grace Hopper, and astronaut
Mae Jemison. In 1997,
I.D. magazine launched its I.D. Forty list of influential designers including Kare and Steve Jobs.
Legacy Susan Kare is considered a pioneer of
pixel art and of the
graphical user interface, having spent three decades of her career "at the apex of human-machine interaction". Kare's work has a
cult following, and large print versions of her digital portfolio are sold privately and at MoMA. ==Personal life==