What a wonderful article!
I have always loved Susan’s work, particularly the dogcow — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow — and her bitmap fonts — http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
I have always loved Susan’s work, particularly the dogcow — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow — and her bitmap fonts — http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
I recently came across this talk of her, and highly recommend watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jlb77dDHIXQ she explains a bit about the history of her work.
One of the main reasons I find her so inspiring is that her work clearly shows why adding a great designer to a great team of engineers can result in ever lasting impact.
As a designer myself, I work with teams of engineers (mostly in the B2B SaaS Space [1]) who write great software but don't have the skills to design a delightful experience for their users. It's a shame there are still too many teams of talented engineers out there who don't see the importance of great design.
A few times I've said (well, not these exact words), "Give that UI to me, I may not be a professional designer or even an experienced front-end developer, but at least I care about making something usable." I was actually told once that I had to scrap my interface and re-do it, because it made the rest of the product look bad by comparison.
As an aside, I think you provide an obviously valuable service, wish I had come across it before I had done the UI for my current project :)
> In 1983, the dog icon had been created by Susan Kare as the glyph for "z", as part of the Cairo font. Later, when designing the classic Mac OS "Page Setup" print dialog box, an example image was required to demonstrate the orientation and color of the paper.[2] HCI engineer Annette Wagner made the decision to use that dog as a starting point, editing it and creating a larger version with spots to be more suitable for demonstrating various printing options. The new dog graphic had a more bovine look.
It claims that Susan Kare made the dog icon but Annette Wagner made dogcow based on it.
I like both Susan’s spotted dog and Annette’s dogcow!
You can also own your very own Dogcow, signed by Susan.