Icons, fonts and a "Kerchief". How three women changed the way we think about graphic design

Susan Care — creator of icons for interfaces

It seems impossible to imagine an operating system without the familiar symbols "My computer" or "My documents", but even before the early 1980s they did not exist. The world owes the appearance of icons to the artist Susan Care.

At school, her favorite subject was fine art, and her mother instilled an interest in embroidery. At the age of 14, Susan got a job as an intern with designer Harry Laux at the Philadelphia Science Museum. Here she got acquainted with typography and graphic design. In college, Care had already painted posters, brochures, holiday cards and invitations, and after graduation she saw herself as either a teacher or an artist.

In 1983, having no experience with computers, Susan got a job at Apple Computer, Inc. She had to create a How Susan Kare Designed User-Friendly Icons for the First Macintosh / Smithsonian magazine graphics for the new series of Macintosh home devices. Already at the interview, she showed her first sketches. These were hand-drawn icons in a notebook. Each cell corresponded to one pixel — the experience of cross-stitching paintings was useful. Among the first sketches was the classic index finger symbol for the "Insert" command, and the images of some implemented icons have survived to the present day. For example, a bucket icon for a "Basket" or a printer for a "Print".

Susan Care worked at Macintosh until 1986. During this time, she has created many fonts known to Mac computer owners: New York, Geneva, London, Toronto and Venezia. After she was fired, she founded her own design studio, and in 1989 began working with Microsoft. The result of this work was How Susan Kare Designed User-Friendly Icons for the First Macintosh / Smithsonian magazine the familiar solitaire "Klondike". It was Care who came up with the classic card design, which was taken as the basis for all such games in this operating system.

In the noughties, the artist continued to work in the graphic design industry, including being the creative director of Pinterest. A poster with the image of the first icons can be purchased on the Care website, she leaves her autograph on each one. And since 2015, that very sketchbook has been on display Susan Kare Apple Macintosh OS icon sketchbook / MoMA in the permanent exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

April Greiman is an experimenter with computer layout

If graphic design is now a full—fledged industry, then in the 1980s specialists treated new technologies with distrust. It seemed that the capabilities of computers would never compare with the good old pencil, and pixelation of the image was perceived as a marriage. April Greiman, unlike her colleagues, immediately became interested in digital graphics. The father of a graduate of the Basel School of Design worked as a system administrator and programmer, so the girl was familiar with technology since childhood.

In 1984, Greiman bought her first Macintosh and immediately began experimenting. Pixels, limited colors — all this became a source of inspiration and a new artistic language for her. A year later, Aldus Corporation released the first PageMaker digital layout program. With her help, in 1986, the artist created April Greiman- Does it Make Sense? / Graphic Design Talk Does It Make Sense? ("Does it make sense?") — a poster of text, photos and symbols. First, Greiman drew a layout and printed it out in parts on a regular printer. Then she combined the fragments into a single image, photographed the result and took the finished version to the printing house. The creative approach so impressed the industry that one of the issues of Design Quarterly magazine turned into Greiman's work: it could be completely unfolded and hung on the wall.

April has been experimenting with digital graphics software all her life, creating many magazine covers and even a postage stamp design. It was dedicated to 1998 AIGA Medalist: April Greiman / AIGA the anniversary of the adoption of the amendment to the US Constitution, which gave women active suffrage. The expressive style of the artist, combining the achievements of surrealism, Art Nouveau and digital possibilities, include New Wave Typography / Graphic Design History to the so-called California New wave of design. In 1998, Greiman received 1998 AIGA Medalist: April Greiman / AIGA an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and in 2018 from the Society of Typographic Arts Honorary Members / Society of Typographic Arts .

Zuzana Lichko is the author of many digital fonts

In the early 80s, Zuzana Lichko studied visual culture at the prestigious Berklee College, where she had to take calligraphy classes. She was left-handed, and classes were difficult. Everything fell into place when the first Macintosh computer appeared on the market. It turned out that digital fonts are much easier for her. The girl was also familiar with technology: in her youth, she helped her father with data processing on the first computer.

By the way, the font design industry originated long before the advent of gadgets. They have been developed since the advent of printing in the XVI century. The sphere developed rapidly later, with the beginning of mass production of daily newspapers. Lichko's contribution was precisely that she adapted fonts to digital interfaces. For example, she improved the historical Baskerville, which was developed back in the XVIII century. She named her own version Mrs Eaves / Emigre Fonts Mrs. Eaves, in honor of the wife of John Baskerville, the author of the original. And her Filosofia is an interpretation of Notes on Filosofia Bodoni, invented by the Italian publisher Giambattista Bodoni in 1787.

Zuzana also created her own author's versions of fonts. In 1984, together with her husband, art director Rudy Vanderlans, she began to produce Zuzana Licko / Emigre Fonts Emigre is a fully digital magazine dedicated to graphic design. It published font samples focused on printing text through low-resolution dot-matrix printers. Since 2011, five digital fonts, first published in Emigre, have been stored Zuzana Licko / MoMa in the exposition of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.