Susan Kare is the recipient of the 2019 National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. For over 35 years she has designed many notable icons and graphics that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer. Her early work was developed using a minimalist grid of pixels and constructed with mosaic-like precision; despite the low resolution, the icons communicated their functions immediately and memorably. Known as the artist “who gave the Macintosh a smile,” she was hired at Apple in 1982 and created digital graphics and typefaces for the original Macintosh computer that were inviting, intuitive, and universal. In 1986, she joined Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer, and in 1989 was a founder of Susan Kare Design, spending the next 25 years developing thoughtful solutions to design problems for hundreds of clients, including Autodesk, Facebook, Fossil, General Magic, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, and Pinterest. Since 2015, she has worked as a creative director at Pinterest.
Read more on Cooper Hewitt.