Safetygoat

Ada Lovelace day: Featuring Susan Kare

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Ada Lovelace day is today.  It’s a day to highlight women who’ve had some influence in technology and science.   Ada is believed to be the first computer programmer, at a time when there wasn’t really even any electricity.  A math wizard herself, she saw the potential of her colleagues invention for doing almost everything when everyone else saw it just for solving math problems. Ada Lovelace is a day for others to choose a woman who has been an inspiration to them.

There’s a few fantastic women in technology I’d love to highlight, including two of my best friends here in London (Meg and Magz, both fantastic, passsionate developers).  I had a few more people I was considering writing about including my math teacher in high school, who taught finite, and made statistics so fun, or the goth girl from NCIS, who is so cool but also knows everything about science, but my choice was so easy at the end of the day.

I’m a web designer. Code is important, but what makes a truly fantastic website or program, is how usable it is.

“Move the spotlight over. Here she is, Susan Kare!” (crowd errupts in cheers).

Don’t know who she is?  Oh, sorry.

Well, you know her work, and you probably love it.

Susan Kare worked at Apple back in the day.  She was the screen graphics and digital font designer for the original Macintosh computer. She’s the original designer of all the cute little icons used by the macs for so long, and basically revolutionalized computer displays. Remember the original trash can? The happy mac? Or the bomb when things went wrong? Think about it: apple was the first one to use icons in their graphical “window-style” display, and the rest of the big boys followed suit. She did this all in 1983, when I was just over a year old. Susan Kare, in a big way, changed computer usability, made it accessible to the masses, and continues to do so now.

These days, everyone is harping on about usability in computer software, but Susan Kare was a pioneer in this field. She didn’t use gradients or drop shadows to add emphasis to her work. She cared about every pixel being in place, the fonts being perfect and the whole thing working seemlessly. No gimmics, just solid information design.

Beat that!

ada lovelacefemale scientistsfemale techmy heros blogging