Susan Kare was born in 1954 in Ithaca, New York and is the sister of a physicist and aerospace engineer named Jordin Kare. She went to Harriton High School on 1971 then later on attended Mount Holyoke College. She graduated summa cum laude and earned her Bachelors of Honors in Arts on 1975. Then, she decided to go to New York University (NYU) and earned her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in 1978. Kare moved to San Francisco and did a stint at the Museum of Modern Art.

In the early 1980’s, Kare received a call from her friend Andy Hertzfeld about working at Apple Computer. The company hired her into Macintosh software and she was assigned to design user interface graphics and fonts. She was soon promoted as a creative director and worked under Tom Suiter at Apple Creative Services. She made many icons such as the paint bucket, the bomb, the Grabber, etc. In a interview with Stanford University in 2000, she stated “I had the chance to do that with this commission, and I really enjoyed making this sculpture; but it was kind of solitary, so it was interesting for me to segue from that to working at Apple”. After her tenure at Apple Computer, she accepted to work in NEXT. Kare worked with clients from Microsoft and Information technology company (IBM). At Microsoft, she managed the card deck for Windows 3.0’s solitaire game project and designed multiple icons for Windows 3.0. At IBM, she produced icons and elements for OS/2 and for Eazel, she contributed iconography to the Nautilus file manager.

Some of the fonts she created while working with Apple Computer are Chicago, Geneva, Toronto, and much more. She also created icons from Apple Macintosh such as the paint bucket, the Grabber, the bomb, and etc. She designed these icons with mosaics, needlepoint, and pointillism. Kate procured the smallest graph paper she could find in an art supply store and would use it to draw a 32-by-32 grid. Each of the 1,024 squares represented a pixel and she would hand-sketch many Apple icons pixel by pixel.

In NEXT, she managed the card deck for Windows 3.0’s solitaire game and designed the cards like the queen of hearts, the king, joker, and etc. She made some icons such as the notepad, desktop, clipboard, etc. Due to her magnificent work, she was awarded the 2018 AIGA Medal and was recognized as the woman who gave the Macintosh a smile. During 1988, Susan Kare launched her own firm called Susan Kare Design which is still maintained today. Between 2006 to 2010, Kare designed many virtual gifts for Facebook based on a full color suite of cupcakes, penguins, and rubber duckies which was a departure from her designs of two-dimensional pixel art she made with Apple.

Today, Kare continues to sell her prints on a website called kareprints.com and work as the creative director of Pinterest. Her iconography is featured in many museums like the National Museum of American History, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), and New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque.