Susan Kare: Designing Icons & Graphics For the Original Mac

Susan Kare joined Apple as an art history PhD who barely knew anything about computers. She went on to design many of the icons, typefaces, and symbols that helped make the original Macintosh feel understandable and human, defining a visual language for personal computing that still influences software today. At Startup School 2026, Susan shares the stories behind the Happy Mac, Command key, Chicago font, and more, along with the design lessons she learned from Steve Jobs, Paul Rand, and the original Mac team: make things meaningful and memorable, embrace constraints, iterate constantly, and use just enough detail to make an idea instantly clear. Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/susan-kare-on-designing-the-original

• 0:07Speaker 00

  Hello. I'm Susan Kair. And now for something completely different. I've been an iconographer and designer of worked on a lot of tech projects. And I want to talk about a tech startup I worked for when even though the Macintosh group was part of Apple. But I think a lot of the experiences resonate with some of the topics that I've heard here today. So I've been doing this for a while and love it.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Here's a few things that I designed over the years. And it's funny because this was really a North Star for the Macintosh group. But when I reread it in the last couple of days, it just kind of reminded me of AI and so many things that are being developed now. And Paul Rand is a celebrated graphic designer, no longer with us, who did the UPS logo and IBM logo and so many images that have persisted. And I was lucky to work with him.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  And something he told me was always focus on making things meaningful and memorable. And I think the heart of that is have a good idea and then the form will follow. I was a total art major, didn't know anything about computers and was lucky enough to work at Apple on the Macintosh as the Macintosh artist. And before I went to Apple, I was welding a life-size Razorback hog for a museum in Arkansas.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  And I thought I was living my dream, going out to my garage, welding all day. But in truth, it was a little bit lonely and I was glad I had the experience, but it kind of made me hungry for working with a team. And my high school friend, Andy Herzfeld, was a system software programmer at Apple. And he knew I had worked on the yearbook and liked art. And he said he needed some images to display on a new computer that was being worked on. And he showed me the display, which didn't have a case, and said, could I come in for

• 2:59Speaker 00

  an interview to work on some small symbols and some typefaces? And I said, sure. I thought it sounded great and really interesting and something I hadn't done before. So I thought about it. I had a little bit of typographical experience from working at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. I used a machine like this to make labels for exhibits. And I was pretty good at LetriSet, rub-down type. I could do it really straight and get the kerning right. But I went to the, and I had a PhD in art history.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  So those were my credentials. And I went to the library in Palo Alto and took out some books about typography and some font sample books. And I actually brought them to my interview under my arm. So I would seem as if I knew what I was talking about. And Andy also suggested to me that it would be good if I could make some examples of essentially bitmap graphics, but using graph paper. And he didn't really specify what to make.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  So some things I made, like a pun with a boot and some pieces of paper. And you could see on this slide, there's a little bit of an ABC. But I just tried to make some examples. And these are more of the examples. Sort of funny because some of these really random things slightly influenced what we ended up using in the software. So I spoiled the surprise, but I got the job.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  And I don't think anybody even asked me any questions about font design, despite my prep. And in a funny twist of fate, as much as I had wanted to be an artist, now that notebook with those early icons that I took to my interview is in the permanent collection of MoMA. So it just, so hang on. Definitely hang on to your stuff. So when I got to Apple, the first day, this screen was shown to me to say, this is what

• 5:50Speaker 00

  it's your job to improve. And fonts and the round recs that are on the five and a quarter inch floppy drawing are, could become icons. But they were able with a cursor to click and drag those around. So it already had a little, seemed kind of magical to me. And we definitely changed "do it" to "okay" because "do it" was a little off-color and people read it as "dolt." So I wanted to make a new system font and make some icons.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  So, and it was told to me, it was very sincere that we were trying to make a computer that anyone could use. So I felt good about that because I was in that group. Even though I am happy to work on and have worked on many projects that weren't for me, but I liked that about this project. And we wanted it to be as understandable as possible so you wouldn't necessarily need a manual. And that it should be friendly because there were so many people there who, in the Mac

• 7:17Speaker 00

  software group where I was, who were just passionate about computers, but, and kind of wanted to be evangelical about that. So there were a few constraints. And usually I think you can be creative in any constraints. You can make some pretty fun art with beach trash while you're walking around. And this, you can be creative, but it's good to understand what the constraints are. And then be excited about that as opposed to being upset that you don't have a thousand colors. So this is 16 by 16, black and white.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  And I think the first images that I made using those constraints were things like this. And we thought about, you know, thought maybe a lasso would be a good way to surround an irregular region and some other art tools. And it's funny to me because I went to Paris for the first time fairly recently. And there's a street artist known as Space Invader, and he does a lot of mosaic work.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  And he has borrowed liberally from early Macintosh stuff, which made me really happy. So the first font I designed was Chicago. It's nine pixels tall, cap height. And I looked at the stuff that was on the screen and it just seemed as if it was all jaggedy. And it didn't seem as if it would be that big a deal to make it look tidier by using horizontals and verticals and 45-degree angles. So I still wince when I look at, especially at that lowercase x. But, but the others, I could pretty much fit into the system.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  And we were so lucky on the Macintosh to be able to do proportionally spaced fonts. Because I could remember just seeing displays where the M was really squished and then the I was really wide. So I didn't realize what a big deal this advancement was, but it seemed to make it look a lot better. And so we used Chicago. We put it in the title bar, experimented a lot with, till we came up with those lines. And what we didn't realize was that when we designed the calculator, that we were designing

• 10:10Speaker 00

  the first iPod, so, which also used Chicago, which made me happy.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  And we shipped some other fonts with the Mac, including Ammonospace font. But I was able to kind of think, well, we should probably have a Times Roman kind of thing and a Helvetica kind of thing. So that's where New York and Geneva came from.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And then I made a font that I called ransom because it was what kidnappers used to do by cutting letters out of the newspaper so they wouldn't have to reveal their handwriting and get caught. And like the other fonts, Andy and I gave them city names. And because we had gone to high school near Philadelphia, we gave them names of towns on the Paoli local through the suburbs into the city. And Steve Jobs came by one afternoon. He usually came by at the end of the day

• 11:23Speaker 00

  and walked around softer group to see what was new. And he said, well, city names aren't bad, but at least call them world-class cities. So that's how we ended up with New York and Geneva instead of Paoli and Wynwood and Rosemont, where our high school was.

• 11:47Speaker 00

  And Bill Atkinson was the programmer who wrote MacPaint. And that was my favorite program, of course, and was happy to collaborate on the icons and the patterns. And he developed an early scanner. And that's how we got this geisha image from a woodcut that Steve Jobs owned.

• 12:15Speaker 00

  And we made a control panel that had animation for when you change the settings, hoping to communicate what would happen and what your choices were. And we tried, obviously, not to use... We could use sound, we could use speed, but we tried not to have any text so that it could be international without having to make a different version.

• 12:46Speaker 00

  And, you know, we didn't have that many really great tools for art, but whatever, we forged ahead. Andy wrote... I did not have to design on graph paper once I got to Apple. Andy wrote an icon editor. And this is an image writer... A picture of an image writer print of what the screen looked like with the icon editor. And there were no tools. You could just toggle the bits. And you could see a greatly enlarged image as well as what the icon looked like at 72 DPI. And I thought this was just magical, even though it didn't have 20 levels of undo

• 13:31Speaker 00

  and you couldn't draw any shapes. You could iterate without an eraser. It just... It's hard to overstate how great this was. And it automatically generated the hex code for an icon, which I could then type in and see the image on the screen. So it was a marvel.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  This icon isn't crying. It was probably me counting pixels, for some reason, down the edge. And you can see in the title bar, we tried a bunch of different types of things during the time we were experimenting.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  And sometimes I liked to... People came and sat, and I would do their portrait in 32 by 32.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  So people seemed to enjoy that. And there wasn't really a way to get a photo in there at the time or even a drawing. So just had to do it from life.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  And I still enjoy making those portraits. And I think it's kind of amazing that in a thousand dots, if you iterate a lot, you can get an image with some semblance of resemblance. You can see Pharrell Williams is at the top on the right and Ashton Kutcher under him. They did not sit for their portrait.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  And some people that aren't super well-known, and John Maeda, who's a design leader.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  The one thing that... One of the first icons I was assigned was... It took a while for the computer to boot when it got turned on. So everybody wanted an image on the screen, and it had to be 32 by 32 because it was only 128K Macintosh.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  So because the computer was sitting there, kind of grinding while it started up, we wanted something that showed that everything was okay. So I thought a smile was good. I'm pretty sure it came from my memory of a button I got when I was about 14. And I like smiling and happy things. Understanding Happy Mac is a play on the title of this excellent book by Scott MacLeod, which is about comics,

• 16:29Speaker 00

  but really has so many good insights about user interface, too. It came out 10 years after the Mac originally did. And I pulled two illustrations from that book

• 16:45Speaker 00

  by Scott MacLeod that kind of explains some of the thinking behind our icons, which is that when a face in particular has a lot of detail, it looks like somebody else. But if you make it really simple, everyone can project themselves onto it. And I love that idea. And he expressed a similar thing with the less detail you have,

• 17:18Speaker 00

  the more universal something is, which is why I think like a simple drawing of a pencil can stand for writing in some ways better than a chrome pen with a reflection, which is very fancy, but it's a very particular kind of pen that not everybody might write with. So my bias in icons is a salient detail or two, but don't lard it with a lot of extra stuff, kind of similar to street signs, like the sign where there's silhouette of two kids holding hands at a school crossing.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  And there's not a technical reason that they couldn't have plaid lunchboxes and shoelaces or be singing a song, but it would probably be more distracting and just take away from that instant recognition that you're aiming for. We made some mistakes, too. I was told that as an alternative to the Happy Mac, if in the extremely unlikely event something went wrong with the Mac, there should be an unhappy Macintosh. So I thought maybe a sick Macintosh or looks a little hungover.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  And again, that I could be irreverent because no one was going to see this. At least, that's what I was told. Same thing with this icon.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  They needed an image for total system failure, which, of course, again, no one would ever see. So I thought maybe it would be kind of funny to have a bomb, like a Bugs Bunny type of bomb. But unfortunately, people did see this. And one time, I was working in the softer group with... It was a glass room, the fishbowl. And the receptionist from the front said a call had come through to Apple from a person who really needed to talk to someone in the softer group, not me, about her Macintosh because the caller was worried

• 19:42Speaker 00

  that she was looking at a bomb and was her computer going to explode. So I felt a little guilt.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  But the moral of the story is lots of iteration. And we started with

• 20:03Speaker 00

  the handful of applications that we had. And so I did Mac Paint first, I remember that. And I liked the idea that since it was a process, it looked kind of active. And then it could be paired with a document that resembled it. So our system was kind of a verb and a noun. And it seemed like this could hold up pretty well for the because we only had maybe half a dozen applications and didn't really have the mindset that there would be thousands of applications. Same with alerts. I tried to crop a person.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  It's not a person with a little square head. It's the idea is it's a crop. So you don't know the gender or the age or the hairdo or really anything about this glimpse of a person. And I had only seen a sand timer as an egg timer. It seemed like, hey, we're in the 80s. Let's like update these things. So that's we made a watch cursor instead of an hourglass.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  This was the icon for print. And it's it's kind of a trap. The image writer did have paper with holes up the sides that would fit on the sprockets to attach when you turn the big knob on the side. But again, too much detail. It would have had a much longer lifespan if I had just stopped and made it simpler. So in general, I think it's not good in icons to show pictures of a particular product design because like the three and a half inch floppy for save.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Even though there's still a few of those kicking around, but obviously it didn't age well. Better to use a metaphor. Just enough detail. So this is what our dropdown menus looked like. And we had the apple. We called it the apple menu. And there was an apple going to be an apple key for these keyboard shortcuts. But Steve came in one day at the end of the day and said, you cannot do this. I think he called it an apple farm and said, our logo is precious and we have to respect it. So, you know, we just can't have a bunch of apples.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  So then the idea was I was told that that key was a command key or a feature key. And so I began thinking about commanding. And it seemed kind of mean. The 10 commandments seemed like a pun.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  So back to the library. And I came across this image in a book with that was called a feature. So I thought, okay, it kind of looks like a four leaf clover. That's sort of lucky. And it kind of looks like a clover leaf highway, which might be a way to get somewhere fast. So we ended up, and it had the bonus of being really easy to draw in 16 by 16. So we used that and it's still on the keyboard. But I felt like a little bit

• 23:54Speaker 00

  bad that it didn't. It was abstract. And sometimes abstract things can be harder to remember. And then something that has a metaphor that reinforces the concept. But

• 24:12Speaker 00

  I I went to Sweden. And I was so excited to get off the plane in Gothenburg. And there's the feature key. Because it it's used there to indicate that you're near

• 24:30Speaker 00

  like for sightseeing, like a monument or something else. And someone from Sweden must have heard me comment on this. And said, actually, that symbol that's on the signs is taken from a 1200 AD castle called the Borgholm Castle. And it's a ruin. But when you see it from above, you see that it's like a castle with four turrets. And so that's actually what that symbol represents.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  So I thought it was fun to find out even after the fact. It did look like something after all.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  And, you know, you study art history. You know, there's not much new under the sun. People have been making little symbols for a long time. And no, I did not design this.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Hieroglyphics had their day. This is a cartoon kind of showing that hieroglyphics are sort of back.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  And there's some really pretty nice bitmap fonts.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Pretty long developed pretty long ago. This has only it's like a seven pixel capital height. So I thought that was, I wish we had that person. And there's a lot of carvings with symbols and text and illustration that like resembles some of the things that we were doing on the computer.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  And again, like another extremely nice bitmap font. 200 plus years before we sat down to make our proportionally spaced fonts. Here's a very nice example.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  This has about a character height of like 10 pixels.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  And I realized that maybe I was destined or trained from a young age to want to make things on a grid because it used to be acceptable to get little kits so your kids could make the parents an ashtray. And I loved making this type of thing.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  And we I like to think that there were emojis in the 1984 Macintosh that you could combine pictures with text before there was texting. And there's a few things hidden in here. It obviously had a hieroglyphic

• 27:25Speaker 00

  antecedent, and I hid some hieroglyphic type symbols in there. But I think the whole point of that project and the graphics was it isn't really just about a grid of pixels. It's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything. So this is just a super quick run through of some icon options that I did for Swatch. And they wanted an alarm. So of course, I started with a clock and made it noisier. And then made it look a little bit more literal. And then a little louder.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  And simpler, maybe. And or maybe it should look like, oh, it's a travel alarm clock would be in your head if you saw this. And then I thought, way too self referential. Why would you want a clock on a clock? So I was making other things that looked a little bit noisy as options.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  And like the alpha alarm clock.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  The the point just being this is so not an exact science. And I always like to show either what a client asks for or what a programmer might have used as a placeholder. Because I've gotten so many good ideas that way. And then maybe refine them a little bit. But after I worked at Apple, I did a job for Microsoft on Windows 3.0. And color, even if 16 colors. And some of them weren't very good colors. But it was still so nice to have to be able to use red for alerts

• 29:23Speaker 00

  and to differentiate at a glance a little easier when you had color as another option. And I wanted to make something that didn't look like a garish chessboard. You know, there were a lot of illustrations like that. So this is all those 16 colors, but dithered so that they appear a little more subtle.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  And I also did something that I guess there's always a way to get addicted to something on your screen. And in the 90s, a lot of people played Solitaire. I had to take it off my computer so I didn't play too much. And Slate at the time thought that Solitaire made a dent.

• 30:17Speaker 00

  And I'm just going to show a few images that I made in the decades after Apple and before. Some examples of good advice that I wanted to share with you. So.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  I've worked for a lot of clients and we're not going to talk about them all. And I feel so grateful. Again, some, some things that were fun and some things that were serious and some things that wanted self-consciously to seem like business. But I worked on a project for General Magic. I did the logo and we had a different kind of desktop metaphor. It was a little more literal and hallways with doors. And I think the very worst thing we had was jars of text. Because why?

• 31:19Speaker 00

  But the idea was that you could remember where things were by going and finding them in a logical way. And I kind of laugh, wince, like all these things are gone. Like no Rolodexes, no, no phones that looked like that. But at the time, it, yeah, no file cabinet. I mean, there still are file cabinets. But at the time, you could tap on those drawers and they would come out and you could put whatever you wanted in there. And that was kind of a fun project that just didn't.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  We could send postcards, but it didn't quite anticipate email. I worked for Facebook on a project that you couldn't just upload images, but you could buy images for a dollar, like a real dollar and send them to people. So I thought this was a wonderful project of kind of having a gift shop. And what could you draw that someone would want enough, either to have or to share with someone that it was worth spending a dollar on? So did, we did this for not quite four years

• 32:41Speaker 00

  and had a new gift every day that launched at midnight on the East Coast. And we could kind of tell by maybe quarter after if it was going to be a successful best seller by just how many sold in that first 15 minutes. And we had some limited editions and we had some, I thought maybe if you made something that costs thousands of dollars, like diamond earrings and a Rolex and did fancy things, that it would seem more worth a dollar because it was so expensive. But what I learned was that cute trumped everything.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  It just, teddy bears, anything heart shaped. The Kiss Mark was the best seller of all time. And I would say if my life depended on selling a drawing for a dollar, I now know I would draw a penguin. Because we had, we had multiple limited editions of penguins and they all sold out. So, but it was just interesting. We did some collabs with Britney Spears and other entertainers. And ultimately, Facebook ended this program because they didn't want to compete with third parties.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  But it was good while it lasted. Then I did some icons for Pinterest, where a terrific animator helped me with these. I thought just a little bit of motion so that it wouldn't get really irritating over time. And I made many icons there. This isn't all for Pinterest, but some of them were. I made a logo for a stealthmill.com, which terrific company. But before they had their real logo, we did a trash panda.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  And but like, because it dealt with trash in a similar way. And this is an illustration, The National, which is Amtrak's magazine, invites artists, I think it's a quarterly magazine, and they have artists interpret their roadmap. So I thought it might be fun to go back and do pixelated icons for places that, where you could take the train. And I love doing logos. This is for Magic Puzzle, which really does make these great jigsaw puzzles that then after you finish, they perform a magic trick, not levitating.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  But I, I was an artist doing studies for the logo, which is pretty close to this, for Pikmin Bloom Game and Paradox, which is a game. And love doing avatars. You know, it's just kind of, avatars are so freeing because they can stand for anything. So it like kind of made me feel like gifts. You just want to have an array that someone can find something that speaks to them.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  And I just did these badges for a fairly new ledger crypto wallet. And it has a little attachment opening in the front so that you can personalize it. And they really wanted to have something a little bit retro looking. And this is a logo for a VC firm where the idea is get out of the office and work, work in the mountains, work somewhere outdoors was the idea of this.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  And Dave Moran, a friend, called and said, on a Friday, I think, and wanted to have an image and T-shirts and hats like by Monday. So kind of a quickie project, but it was fun to get to have a little bit of experience with something that was new. And now I wanted to share some advice that I've been given by people that I met. Not, it's not a Google project. And I'm always looking to add to it.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  So I welcome any, any good advice that you want to send along by people that really influenced me. And this Paul Rand I mentioned earlier, just a terrific designer who started working, I think, for magazines when he was around 15. And he said that, he was kind of like, all this stuff with all these new fonts, it's like, you don't need that many. He, he was kind of brusque. You don't need that many fonts. You just have to know how to use them well. And this is some of his work.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  I got to work with him at a company called Next, where Steve Jobs went after he had to leave Apple. And I of course wanted to hire Paul Rand for the logo because he was my hero. And Steve hadn't really heard of him. And he thought we should have a contest, like probably, which I would never think is the best way to get good creative. But he said we could hire five people or firms and pay them each 15K. And then we would pick the best and continue to work with them. So I invited some people and then I invited Paul Rand.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  And he said, you will pay me $100,000. I will do one logo and you will like it. And that is actually what happened. And we did like it and we did pay him. And it was, it was such a great learning experience for everybody to work with him. Among other advice he gave me, these are the fonts that he tended to use a lot. And I noticed in his work, he also tends to use the same colors. And I kind of thought, okay, if PMS 354 green is good enough for Paul Rand, it's good enough for me.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  And I still tend to look in his books and use some of the colors that he recommended for Next. He did, in, in, just as an offhand remark, say that.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  But when we were talking about logos, he really advocated trying hard to think of a way to do something to the name of the product, kind of the way he put Next in the cube.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  He showed this as what not to do. This is a couple AT&T logos ago. Because he said, "If you can spend a ton of money to make some random symbol associated that doesn't really mean anything much, I mean, I guess it's the world, with your logo,

• 40:40Speaker 00

  you can do whatever you want, but most people don't have unlimited money." So these are some logos that he did. And you can kind of get the idea that Morning Star has a rising sun and IBM is pinstriped and businesslike. And I love that UPS logo. And he said, when he was doing it, he showed it to his six-year-old daughter and said, "Catherine, what is this?" And reportedly, she said, "It's a present, Daddy." And he thought that that was such great justification that it was understandable. But really, it had a shield and a package.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  And sadly, they modernized it because I'm sure there were people sitting around a table who said, "Well, we're not just about packages anymore." But I keep hoping they'll bring it back.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  And this is a futurist named Paul Saffo. And I just loved this quote that he mentioned one day. And I kind of get this in a metaphorical way. And I mean, I know, I always think, "I can do this in an hour." When really, nothing takes an hour. And so many projects I've worked on, you optimistically think you know exactly what you want to do, but it's still allow extra time. This is my dad, who was the director of the Manel Chemical Sensors Center in Philadelphia,

• 42:25Speaker 00

  which studied taste and smell. And I introduced my dad to Paul Rand, and he made that logo for Manel, which I felt pretty happy about. And they got along really well. But my dad, I think, always had good advice. It wasn't the most cheerful advice, but it was realistic. And he had to raise a lot of money for the science center, so he knew what he was talking about. And I try to remember that because, well, I get depressed when I hear "no."

• 43:02Speaker 00

  And he also said this, which I think is like a really realistic way to think about things and not be kidding yourself.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  This is Daniel Nord, who was born in Sweden, now lives in Portugal, and worked in London for the mayor. He's an architect. And he told me how they used to just sit around tables and have endless discussions about things. And this is how he said,

• 43:40Speaker 00

  "Make it visual." I mean, I guess this is a metaphor too, but "do the drawing." Really,

• 43:50Speaker 00

  "Show, don't tell," I think is what he meant. And this is a guy, maybe well-known in some circles, named Jean Pogozzi, who I met through Steve Jobs. He was kind of an Apple fan. He maybe invented the selfie, but had a lot of celebrity friends. And his father, he was Italian, and his father started the Simca Car Company. So that, you know, he said, "So that I could spend my life doing whatever I wanted." And he collects African art. And he said, and this amused me,

• 44:36Speaker 00

  because it just, it does seem like a long time ago and a lot of fun that we worked on the Macintosh. And he also said this, which I think, like, I try to do. I think it's good advice.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  And this is Andy Hertzfeld on the left, Bill Atkinson, Bud Tribble, and Steve Jobs, and Alan Kay on the right, who's a really, who's in his 80s now, unbelievably accomplished computer scientist. And this is Bud quoting Alan Kay as a kind of tenet about user interface and maybe not having everything at the same level and nesting things so that things can just appear that ease of use seems possible. And I always try and think about that.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  And Alan Kay said this to me, and I thought that was, I took great joy hearing that because he just said, "Yeah, it's like, who knew? Proportionally spaced fonts can actually look pretty good."

• 45:54Speaker 00

  And this guy, pretty well-known. He's sitting in my cubicle at Apple. And he did say, in the 80s, like, "Appreciate what you have right now."

• 46:10Speaker 00

  And the first offsite I went to, he put up these three goals. And because of the second goal, a programmer named Steve Kaps and I, Steve Kaps sewed a black flag, and I painted a skull and crossbones on it and put a striped apple as the eye patch. And we went to work in the middle of the night and climbed up on the roof because obviously, security was a lot more lax back then. And we flew that flag. And it was really just as a rejoinder to this, that we were the pirates.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  This too, I remember. We used to show the Mac to lots of people. And I still think of this now because obviously, you say, "Like, some people can figure out how to use this, but not everybody." And then there was great joy because they could feel smart or they wouldn't feel dumb if you said it was easy and they still had trouble with it.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  This is the only piece of really bad advice I got from Steve Jobs.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  He said, "If Apple..." And I thought, "Well, I'm not going to buy my stock if he's not buying his." He would know. And he also said,

• 47:42Speaker 00

  "Like, Susan, you can twiddle bits and never make more than $20,000." Or like, "It's better to be a creative director." He was talking about Next, and I was a creative director. And I got to work with Paul Rand. That was fantastic. But ultimately, I was a bit twiddler at heart, and I went back to it. And maybe not always bits, but...

• 48:12Speaker 00

  And I think this is debatable, but he took lots of visiting executives to see this movie.

• 48:22Speaker 00

  And I liked it because it had welder in it. Jay Shiat started the ad agency that Apple used, Shiat Day. And this was kind of the, it was not work-life balance at the time. And everybody I worked with in the software group had a sleeping bag in their cube.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  And I think this is really good to remember. It's, I know a couple companies I've worked for, we kind of decided that 15 people, you could still have consensus hiring and everybody in a room and be on the same page. And then you start to get more people and there's a plus and an upside and a downside.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  And Andy said this. He gave me this advice showing stuff to Steve. He's like, "Don't show him one thing because he'll say he doesn't like it because it maybe forces you to go try and do it again and be better." And, but if you show a few things, then he can be involved and say that something is terrible, but still pick something.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  And this is advice from my mom, and I think it's very good advice.

• 49:46Speaker 00

  This is Evan Sharp and Ben Silberman, who started Pinterest. And they had a lot of good ideas. But Evan used to say this.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  This is Dennis Wang, who started working at Google when he was an undergrad at Stanford. And he's a terrific computer scientist and artist. And he told me this, that was the prevailing wisdom at Google. And I would probably preach the same thing, like, "Don't mess around with the logo and put it in a different color and put it on a crazy background until people know it so well that you can play with it." But obviously, they did, Dennis made these. They did pretty well with this.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  And this is something a friend's dad told me.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  This is not political. It's just a fun picture I found with an accordion. And you know this guy? He has a lot of truly good advice, including this. But I don't think it means be discouraged and quit trying. It just means, "Oh, maybe it's time to go on to the next idea."

• 51:17Speaker 00

  And thank you. But also, really, thank you to Y Combinator. I kind of had an amazing day today. And everything ran so smoothly. And everyone was so gracious. So, and it just seemed like, I felt envious of everybody taking part in this event because it just seemed so cool. Thank you.