
Recontextualizing the Work of Susan Kare
Recontextualizing the Work of Susan Kare

One of the most influential designers of the digital age is Susan Kare. For a design research project, I chose to study her decades of work and document them in a new format. The outcome is a website that works like a timeline. It starts with her 1983 assignment with Macintosh 1 and concludes with a 2015 Pinterest rebrand. The timeline displays an abundant collection of assets, icons, typefaces, and more on a pixel grid, all unearthed from books and internet archives. The biggest struggle for the project was figuring out a good system to navigate the jungle of pixels onscreen. After many iterations and testing, I settled on creating a digital helper that moves around the timeline and provides some much-needed context. In figuring out how to explore the space myself, this project gave me a new understanding of the pixel. Having to recreate many of the assets for better clarity, I learned how tedious and impressive the craft is to design for systems with visual limitations. Kare navigated this space with precision and detail; the goal of my website was to demonstrate that.





