You have probably one time or another seen her work – artist and graphic designer Susan Kare laid the foundation of how symbols used in graphical user interfaces look today. In the early 80's, Susan joined Apple, and is the one responsible for designing many of the typefaces and icons found in the original Macintosh operating system. After leaving Apple, she started to work at NeXT, a computer company co-founded by Steve Jobs after he was forced to leave Apple, which gave her clients such as Microsoft and IBM. Here, from Wired's piece "Meet the Woman Who Launched a Billion Clicks":

In the early 90s, when Wired was founded, Kare was designing icons for Windows, including the logos for Solitaire and playing card designs for Windows' games, some of which made their way into the book. Since then, she says, "The basic problem that you're trying to solve by designing an icon for a screen has not changed: you aim to create an image that's a visual shorthand for a concept. If you do your job well, that image becomes meaningful as a symbol – something easy to recognize and remember."

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"Visual complexity is not necessarily directly proportional to effectiveness," she says. "Key to the creative process is still the fundamental effort to present a functional image which works well as a symbol for its intended audience."

Featured image: Screenshot of Susan's website.