Creators: Susan Kare

Susan Kare is a San Francisco-based designer and artist. She’s best known for designing many of the early Mac user interface elements, including icons. She also designed Facebook’s early “gifts” icons. Buy her icons book here.

1) What have you been making lately?

All kinds of icon design and corporate identity projects, along with creating new images and icon prints for kareprints.com. Kareprints published a book about icons at the end of 2011, and I am working on an icon alphabet book.

One recent favorite project was working on screen fonts and images for www.metawatch.com (its founders headed up the Watch Technology Division for Fossil).  I did the screen for this URL and the watch display fonts.

2) What’s your favorite and/or newest tool that you use for work?

All-time favorites: Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. And I bought the newest iPhone (4S) because I liked the camera so much and frequently use it to capture images that inspire icons.

3) What’s your favorite and/or newest tool that you use for fun?

For fun, am totally enjoying a Pearson Arrow Formula One longboard. I love surfing and this board is light and easy to turn.

4) What’s something great you’ve read lately?

[Link to this post by Karan Arora.]

(“Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed. Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms”).

When I drive, I try to listen to some of the great classic books I’ve never read. One recent standout: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren.

Guilty pleasure: the Hunger Games trilogy.

And something great to watch: A feature length dance music video set to Girl Talk’s “All Day”.

5) Who should I interview for this series?

Jill Savini (thoughtful and accomplished graphic designer). Ann Rhoney (photographer). Her hand-colored photographs will be included in this upcoming show at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC: “Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop“.

SplatF Creators highlights my favorite creative-types and the tools they use for work and fun. Previously: Nina Mehta, designer and visual music artist.