She is very talented, and has a good eye for proportion & shape. When you compare the classic black-and-white Macintosh to Amiga, GEM, OpenWindows, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 &c. you see that the Mac was head-and-shoulders above the rest.
With Kare's icons, even the pixelation looked cute.
[1] I was briefly enchanted with GEM because it made my DOS machine look and feel like a Mac, but when I compared it to an actual Mac it looked horrible.
This is what GEM looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/...
And this is what System 1 (original Mac OS) looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Mac...
The Amiga desktop was such a missed opportunity. Take the first mass-market computer capable of high-resolution graphics in 4,096 colors and make the icons... wait for it... black, white, and orange on a blue background.
A friend of mine who was legally blind had an A1000. I sometimes wonder if it was only for the icons.
Function over form is a part of the Amiga design. Its graphical shell is called "Workbench" and not "Desktop" -- it was thought of as a computer for engineers and makers who were willing to forgo prettiness for practicality.
It's one of the clearest versions of "Less is more" that I have ever seen.
It's a shame they replaced the colors with a grey-in-grey nothingness starting in OS version 2.
Guess that just shows that one can't argue about taste :-)
She was creative director at NeXT, and was a founder of Easel so did icons for Nautilus on Linux. She worked on OS/2 for IBM.
Essentially she has had a big say in the look & feel of every desktop operating system.
http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html
I'm not sure what is her work and what isn't aside from the Solitaire cards.