Twiddling Bits with Susan Kare

First of Kind, Season one would not be possible without the support of our sponsors. Thank you to Linear, Perplexity, Cursor, Framer, and Granola.

Maybe we should go through each of the interviews.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And talk about why they fit that mold of first of a Kind.

Susan Kerr is maybe the first.

This is the.

This was the one where I felt like you were, like, actually nervous.

Yeah, this.

This is one where there was a lot. You had built this one up a lot in your mind. So, Susan, care. First of Kind. And why were you so nervous?

I think I was nervous because she is a living icon in so many different ways, is the person you want to. Want to be. You want to have that degree of influence over an industry. What designer doesn't want their work in a museum? But she combines that with a humility and a genuine love of creating this very adventurous spirit that I just so deeply admire. She wants to stay close to software. She wants to continue doing her work. Talking to her made me realize, like, why she answered our call, Facebook and worked on Virtual Gifts with us, because she has a genuine curiosity and a fascination with what role technology can play in the fabric of people's lives. And she wants to keep advancing her own craft, her own work there. I love hearing that her career in some ways bridges the design discipline of Paul Rand with, you know, modern technology today with a Pinterest. Right. Or Facebook. And I think more than anything, I was nervous because I wanted to make sure that we gave her the fullest opportunity to tell her story, her way, that we were able to kind of create an environment which she felt comfortable to conduct an interview that I think, in large part, she did as a favor to me, not to herself. And so I felt a. A deep responsibility for that.

And I was happy that you got to experience that, given how much you'd built it up in your own mind. I. I love that you guys were able to have that moment together.

Yeah. Because it felt like a way to say thank you totally for something that really mattered in my own life. And we forget that there was no Place playbook. She could not hop on the Internet because there was no Internet to speak of, to look up reference images for how people did bitmap raster graphics, because that hadn't been invented yet. And yet she was able to find a voice and a spirit in a new medium and to do so for generations of people. I think that was just so profound to me that she had such an accomplishment. And yet she circled back on multiple software companies to find new Ways in which to contribute. Right.

I mean, that's it.

Right.

Like she's still now exploring VR and AR and like, how cool that these are all just kind of chapters of that overall journey. I thought, man, she really loves to explore the frontier.

Yeah.

Which is unique for someone at any age, but particularly at that stage of your career.

Thank you for talking with me.

Oh, so happy to be here in your lovely place.

Yeah, we're happy to host you. I wanted to start with the Perplexity Design meetup. Perplexity opened up their doors to the design community. They asked folks to bring books for show and tell and wanted to know what book did you end up bringing and why did you end up choosing that one?

I thought it was a great event and I would say I wouldn't habitually choose to. To go in an evening to mingle.

Yeah. To an office, no less.

Well, the first thing I grabbed, kind of a no brainer, was a Paul Rand book. I am always like, wwprd. What would Paul Rando? And I look at this one particular book. So I brought that and then I brought a Haitian Voodoo flag book that were made from beads because I think I went to an exhibit of those flags a long time ago. Can't even remember where. And sometimes they have little animals and faces. That really seemed like good icon inspiration.

Yeah, yeah.

So I brought that and then I brought an old lettering book. Kind of probably rub down type era.

Yes.

That I used to trace from to make things. Maybe in college. Because I still love it. And even with every single font online, I just have a handful of type books I still like to look at.

I was tickled to see that like at least three times I came across your work in the books that other people brought and to see people be absolutely delighted to get to meet you for the first time because you are such a source of inspiration for folks across numerous generations of software designers. When we're talking about this video series about designers who work on products on things that are new and are unproven and where you kind of don't have the luxury of a playbook to draw from and you're sort of both inventing a new product, but also inventing the playbook inadvertently. It felt incomplete without your voice, your perspective on it.

I really appreciate that.

Thank you. It's absolutely sincere. I want to talk a little bit about the Haitian flags book because. Oh, let's see it.

I brought it.

Amazing. So one of the themes in your work is drawing inspiration from realms and influences way outside of American Software. Oh, wow.

There's that little.

That's bear head.

I don't know.

That's incredible.

I can leave you the book if you want to.

Yeah.

Look through anyway.

So with, with this book and, and other, you know, sources that you've drawn inspiration from, what are you typically looking for? What's. How is this symbolism fed into the work that you've done not merely at Apple, but across the entire lineage of your time design?

And there is so much luck in getting to do this kind of work. But I do make a lot of symbols.

Yeah.

And I always think it's hard. Now maybe it's hard to make a symbol that if you show it to 100 people, they'll all say that means hurry. But I like the idea if you can find something that if someone's told what it is once, either by somebody else or by looking it up in the manual, God forbid, then you'll remember it.

Right.

And so getting inspiration for me, I probably wouldn't go to a book about user interface design. I would rather look at restaurant signage or traffic signage from all around the world, or I love beach combing. So shells and things from the natural world that maybe can be used as a symbol. But it's something people connect with.

Right?

Already.

Yeah.

Versus making like, you know, a four pointed arrow that doesn't really have any intrinsic meaning. Inspiration's everywhere, you know, is it folk art, is it jewelry? I don't know. Do you? How do you get inspiration?

For me there's a turns of phrase for some reason, like they're like fragments of thought that I find that can be useful not for the direct purposes of writing anything, but I find that sometimes they're like these like, almost like really tiny Lego size, like mental models for thinking through problems or explaining a concept to someone. And so I find that like, if you're able to wield analogies, whether they're jellyfish or symbols or things that are abstract or literal, it helps kind of give more ways in which people can route their understanding to a new idea or to something that otherwise would be a little bit opaque and unfamiliar to them. Right. And, and, and like yourself, like you, you sort of have to kind of be studying the natural world for these affordances that exist out there in the wild that in some ways kind of go through this evolutionary process. Like, you know, all those images predate the computer. Right. And so people chose those images for a reason.

It's kind of funny though, because they're beads, which you could say is kind of a pixel Analog. They're not on an exact grid, but they had kind of the same problem to solve. Also, I think what you said about the words, I always find it kind of essential if a requester wants something, whether it's a logo or an icon, you want to hear them state in as few words as possible or a short sentence what they're after or what the big idea is, or what it means so that it isn't just a doohickey that you need. Some corporate entity needs to spend billions of dollars so that you associate your name with that thing. In a very general way, if your symbol or your logo works for you a little more, it means something.

One of the things that connected us was this idea of or this notion that like the work that we do is a byproduct of chance, of luck. And there's sort of like a book sized theory that I have lurking around my head around like, what is luck in practice? Because I've always felt that the classical definitions of it are a bit more removed from the force that I think it actually is, which is much more proactive, something that you can manipulate. It's a force like gravity. People who are early in their careers will come to me and they'll say, like, Soleil, how do I become a designer?

See, they're smart, they're doing that.

But I'll say I often get a little bit frozen by the question because I don't want to remotely suggest there's like one true way. Right. Or like, you know, it's like a law school. You study this, take some Latin, you go to this school and you apply to law school, take your lsat, et cetera, et cetera. And what's so reaffirming to me in talking with designers is discovering the varieties of experience that sit behind their careers. When you think about your own career path, like, what were some of the factors that you felt like pushed and steered you in the right direction? Both that came from within you, but also from your environment.

I went all through school as an art kid. Yeah, I just loved hanging out in the art room and working on the yearbook and making posters for plays and all the things that you can do in school and in college as a volunteer thing, which sort of makes a portfolio. I went to a liberal arts college, I majored in art, but I didn't go to art school, where now I see this, you go to art center, you come out with a really a portfolio in a format that the industry understands.

Right.

And I definitely didn't have that. I Remember, I really thought maybe I either wanted to be an artist, I thought about maybe teaching art and then I thought Hallmark, that would be my dream job. So I still have the book that I made of these sample greeting cards and it has like rubbed down tight. You know, you used to be able to buy these sheets of color that were. So I laugh at how rudimentary it looks, but I tried that and of course got nowhere. I thought I saw an ad from Mattel and I thought being a designer at Mattel, like another was in la.

Yeah, sounds romantic.

Yeah, of course. No response. I had gone to grad school in art history things thinking because my dad was a professor and he's just like, get a terminal degree. You'll never regret it. If you want to teach, you'll be more competitive on paper. I mean, he even said no one ever remembers or cares what you wrote about, but just so it's there in your good resume value.

Right.

So I did that and I did that fast because I wanted to move to California and get a graphic design job or something like that. And I got a job working in a museum, the Fine Arts Museums here in San Francisco. And that was really a mismatch.

What'd you do for them?

For a time. Do you really want to hear. I didn't mean to like overemphasize this, but for a time the de Young Museum had a branch in Embarcadero 3 because they thought, let's bring art exhibits to where people work instead of. Great idea. But was the same team that ultimately put all the art at the airport later, which I think is fantastic.

Yeah, more foot traffic.

But so I was on a kind of a curatorial, low level curatorial team and we thought up different kinds of exhibits. And I mean, I was not a leader, I was a soldier. And so I remember going to Bolinas and there was an artist, Ken Bado, I think just a genius who used to take little tiny toys and printed ephemera and make scenes and then photograph them. Love that.

Almost like dioramas, like uber kind of.

But to make used all kinds of little vintage toys and maybe a lifesaver would be a tire or something.

I mean, how did artistic culture contrast here in the Bay Area from where you came from on the East Coast?

I'd been in New York City my first day at the De Young, someone who worked at the Deang said, well, welcome to the best collection of second rate art, high first rate artists. And he said, everybody's, you know, I was so excited to be There, there's this beautiful museum. And he said, yeah, everybody here is just waiting for the call from New York. I thought, oh, well. But what I found was I visited a lot of artists studios to borrow work for our shows. And a friend of mine said once, yeah, you were on the wrong side of the curatorial equation. It's that I would. I just felt like, why am I not? Can I stay and make stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, it was a way to get here and get a job. I was welding a life size razorback hog for a museum in Arkansas in my garage in Palo Alto. I was so happy I had gotten this commission.

Yeah.

And I was in my garage hammering hours a day. And then to make some money, I was working at a. It was a forward looking furniture store on University Avenue and where I met some great friends that people, wonderful people I'm still friendly with. Yeah, not everybody. While I was working at the store, I couldn't help but think, even though I was working, doing art for me, that was good because I used to think if I could do anything, it would just be able to be an artist and work in my studio and make stuff and show it and sell it. And truthfully, it was a little bit lonely. It was a little solitary. I read in a book once, someone said, yeah, the only conversation I had all day was when there was an exchange of money and which I found sort of depressing. And then I felt a little like, yeah, maybe I'll walk out and get some, you know, get something like just to see people.

Right.

So it was good I had that experience and it helped me realize that maybe I didn't want to be hammering metal all day, even though I enjoyed that.

Right. And so then what was your foray into collaborative work? Because I imagine, you know, there's sort of like the romantic ideal of the solo artists.

On one hand, here's a romantic ideal of solo artist making thing. And I did make a thing and it was. Is at a museum in Hot Springs, Arkansas, when Arkansas, because Bill Clinton was the governor, had a lot of money to spend on.

Yeah.

Stuff like this. Yeah. But then here I was working in a store selling, you know, over educated, selling Balerian stack baskets, you know, to professors and their wives. So. And sometimes when I was looking at people's credit card, I could see who they were and maybe I knew who they were.

Right.

But I'm like a salesperson. That wasn't the right answer. Neither of those were the right answer.

Right.

And then miraculously, my high school friend Andy Hertzfeld, who was an early Apple employee. I think his badge number was 300 and something. He lived around the corner from me and I helped him find that place. And he knew that I liked doing art. And he was a software programmer and a great one. And he said he was working on a project at Apple and he needed some images. This is long ago story. And he said that if I could make some images made out of squares, kind of like a crossword puzzle, he could trade me an Apple ii. He could get me an Apple ii even though I didn't do the work on the Apple ii and I had the Apple ii and I played around with it a little, but I was not transfixed, but I made some images. And truthfully, he was working on the Mac and he just needed some things to put on the screen. Can't even remember what I made, but he. He used them.

Yeah.

And then that turned into I could interview for a job at Apple because they were going to need a lot of little symbols and some typefaces.

Do you remember seeing that work for the first time on the screen?

Yes.

What was it like?

That was. I mean, it was almost like a parlor trick. Whoa. You took my thing from paper and there it is. And I do remember fast forward. I got the job at Apple, worked in the software group, didn't know anything about software, but I learned to appreciate what everyone was doing and people would just ask me for stuff and I would do it. And it was kind of like had a monopoly on that market. So. But it was. I think the first thing I did was the Chicago typeface and that I do have a memory of their installed it and I could see. And I could type with it and see it on the screen. And that, that was really.

That's an essential because they were just.

So capable and fast and creative and I don't know, maybe when you were early at Facebook, could you just make decisions and implement them?

Yeah.

Without having to go through a lot of approval cycles.

We called it rubber stamping. And in fact, there was an early Facebook designer who didn't remain there for very long, but his Subversion account, which is what we use to control access to repo, was never shuttered. And so partially as a gag and partially for the sake of efficiency, we would often rubber stamp our own work with him as the reviewer, the code reviewer.

Oh, that's so funny.

And it made it easy for us to also flag whenever stuff was. Any bugs were pushed to production that were clearly rubber stamped. So it kept us a Little bit honest versus, like, if I used your name as a rubber stamper, you'd definitely get in trouble for not reviewing it adequately. But if it was like an E, you know, I think that's funny.

I was gonna say, here's this person that didn't work there anymore that was producing all this work. At first I thought you were just gonna put you.

Basically, you find somebody to review your code. And it was a way to kind of just like fast track to production. But you're right. You don't really have any sort of processes. The whole team's looking to you for your better judgment to make a call on what's best for the time being. And so much of it, at least on our side, was we had the ability to just change it if it was not the right decision. So nothing felt like a really permanent change. We weren't shipping software in the way that you guys were shipping software, where you were physically moving software.

Well, for a while. I mean, I first worked there. The Macintosh hadn't been introduced yet.

Right. Yeah.

So. And I started at the very end of 1982, and it shipped in 1984. But Andy. I remember Andy in particular, and I don't. I think there were. There were a lot of other programmers there. Steve Capps and Bill Atkinson and Larry Kenyon, Don Denman. But people didn't really design. I mean, I was used to designing on paper. They like to get things into the software as quickly as possible so we could just see and get people's reactions. It was sort of a little ad hoc testing, like maybe things stuck or. You know, I remember just doing tons and tons and tons of different title bars, icons that. Just to try out and see if they worked for people or not. As opposed to formal a B testing.

Yeah.

It's not that I'm against testing. It's just we sort of tested. But it was. It was more a little bit consensus as opposed to what I think of now in years after that, it was more formal review processes.

But it sort of has like a vibe of like a family recipe. Right. Family recipes.

Yeah.

That's kind of tastes great way to describe it of the household. Right. And there's somebody at the end of the day who's going to make the final call on what the ingredients are, what the final instantiation is. But it's not as though they're blind to how everybody kind of responds to that particular dish. It's a bit emergent, but there is like a creative director at the helm.

Yeah. Maybe different people put in sprinkles.

Exactly.

Different things. It obviously was a group project and I'm always a little wary when someone says I'm an interface designer because I think, are you an artist and a programmer and a writer?

Right.

And because I think of it as if you think just because you do graphics, you're, you're not really my opinion.

Right.

Or I think I played a small but visible role because.

Right.

You could. My stuff, you could, you know, it's the shell, you can see it.

Yeah.

So much underneath to make that, to make that possible. Yeah. And I feel I never ever would want to. I don't want to take any credit for anything I didn't do. And I didn't think up how it worked and you know, I could draw a scrapbook, but I didn't think up the scrapbook.

Right.

So yeah. Sometimes people say, what was it like to work for Steve Jobs? And was he mean? And I thought no. But he used to come by at the end of the day and he loved to see what was new, you know, not just for me, but yeah, but he wasn't particularly. I don't remember. Like that's terrible. Don't do that. He was generally supportive and seeing him happy was something I think we all like. It was so enjoyable that you wanted to show him new things he would like. But I think we had a lot of like you say the family or like self government.

Right.

To some degree.

And when you look back on that.

Culture, maybe I misremember it and I'm not giving credit to high up managers but.

Well, I, I feel like sometimes we, we also forget that there's like strife and there's adversity and there's sort of like discussion and sometimes, especially when things are like ambiguous, it's hard to say what the right decision is. Or sometimes you just want to genuinely sleep on it, but you don't have that luxury. Like you kind of have to make a call.

You're right. I think it's ideally you want to design something and let it sit and then go back and let it marinate. Yeah, exactly.

I used to love getting the more exotic ideas into dev way before push because we'd have push on Monday nights pushing these changes because it gave us a little bit of time not merely to fix out and iron out all the bugs, but also to just to let things marinate a little bit. Just to kind of have fresh eyes on something.

Like when. Because sometimes did you find you might design something or have an idea and then you yourself might Go back and look at it and see something you wanted to do. It wasn't even that you need someone else to tell you.

Right. It's more like. It's like you arrange a room in some ways and you sort of let it sit. And then you come back to it. You're like, actually, I don't like where I put this. The spacing is off. I didn't know how to solve for it two days ago, but now I know why it's off. It's because my legs kind of keep clipping here, but the feng shui is not quite right here. And I needed to literally walk through the room a dozen times or walk through this interface a dozen times before I identify. Actually, this. This spacing is goofy. I was sort of like, letting the tool tell me what to do or letting my, like, past self tell me that this is the right solution. When in practice, living in it, eating the recipe 12 times, realize, actually I should let this sit. I should let this marina do a little bit more. I should make this little adjustment because I've been living in it for a little bit. And that's always been, to me, the magic of software is that you sort of. It is a malleable object. It's a thing that, because you can instrument it, because you can live with it, because you can hear how other people use it and feel about it, you can kind of adjust it and shift it along towards some platonic form.

That's where, yeah, maybe my early dream is like, I just wish I could be an artist making art that, you know, in a perfect world would be on a wall in a museum. But really, software that you can change it even over time, you can go back and change it and you can get a wider audience, even if it doesn't have your name on it.

Right. I think that's kind of almost like if you were given permission to walk into the museum and touch it up a little bit.

But I think you're exactly right about both the metaphor of the room. It's very common sense. Like, that's a very, I think, good way to describe that process, because everybody understands what that is. So that. That appeals to me in the way I think about designing things for products that, you know, like, gift to people where they live.

Right.

But also, like, if someone were to ask me to do a logo and how long will it take? I would say probably, like six to eight weeks would be good. Because the truth is, like, if you had to, you could do it in a weekend.

Yes.

But you probably Wouldn't get the best result.

Right.

But ideally I would. When I think about doing that, you know, maybe I screw around for a week or try and think about it and look at books and look at Paul Rand and then maybe have a few different ideas and then just let it sit for a week or two and then come back to it.

Yeah.

And then finish it up with those ideas and then show that to the client and then it's usually pretty quick from there.

Right.

But you want to be able to just mull it over and have it in your head when you're driving or I do in a perfect world.

Yeah.

And sometimes, sometimes they would say no to things because there just wasn't enough time.

Right.

Or people didn't understand why I said, I'm not going to be working on it full time for eight weeks. It's just, it gives you a chance to have more ideas and refine them.

And let it breathe a little bit more Iterate.

Yeah. I do think I am not the fastest person. And it's funny because where I work, I am working on a logo right now and it's hard. Some sort of an abstract concept. And there's a thing that's a placeholder that a firm did that is baffling to me. It doesn't mean anything. It's not really out yet. But I think it sort of pains me to think about, like, why would we have that?

Right.

A young designer is working on it with me. We're on a team. There's a marketing person. And I think this guy's great. In some ways he's the opposite of me because we started, let's say 12 hours ago. And what do you think about this? And I think, yeah, that's good. But let's, let's like. But it was sort of a version of what there is right now. And I'm kind of like, well, I'm still like, what is it? What do you even. How do you even describe what this thing it took? So sometimes I think I am not very fast, but I usually rationalize that a few months down the road, no one ever remembers how long it took or what it cost.

Right.

It's just what it is, what it is.

Yeah. And I've always felt like with your work, like you just do such a great job of what I would describe as a conceptual grounding, that there's a conceptually grounded work that you can ultimately like refine iterate upon. But where, like as an idea, a shard sort of sits in your head, it's like it's, it's monumental. It's like, ah, okay. Yes. This sort of feels closer to Platonic than sort of just like a version.

I'm saying that. I mean, I think that's a very Paul Rand thing.

Yeah. And so how did that come about?

Meaningful and memorable.

Yeah.

And I don't think it'll be memorable if it's not meaningful. Yeah. It's like, should icons be super realistic? Should they be. I don't think it's like hemlines.

Yeah.

Or platform shoes. Or not.

Right.

It's just trying to make something that makes so much sense if you can, I mean, at least aim for it.

Yeah.

It's like you're your. How did you think of thumbs up?

It was honestly, it was just one of those things where we like. Yeah, well, we, we was. We had a bunch of glyphs that we had already kind of created internally to run experiments. And one of the earliest for like. No, not even for like.

Oh, just for all kinds of things.

Just like, you know, Aaron Citig had drawn these two, like, thumbs up and thumbs down glyphs for ranking in Newsfeed because we realized that it might be helpful or the Newsfeed team realized it'd be helpful if people could downrank certain stories that maybe they wanted to see less of. And it was one of like, several experiments that we had floating around and as like a placeholder for this like, feature. The thumbs up gesture felt native to Facebook because we had other hand gestures, you know, like the Pokemon icon. Right. There's something universal about the hand as an object that kind of related to this, like, universal aspiration we had for Facebook as a product, as a service. And so when thinking about like, symbols that really can withstand the test of time, like human anatomy is really like a load bearing concept. Right. And so it felt like it kind of sat neatly in like an emerging language to use a hand to indicate like. And we'd even gone through, you know, the heart icon stars. We kind of ran the gamut of like, trying out different expressions of like. But the one that felt most native to Facebook and that certainly resonated with Zuck was, yeah, like, the thumbs up feels like us. It feels like the Facebook way. You know, I get assigned way too much credit for, for that. And for me, like, what I take pride in isn't that it was the evolution of Newsfeed to introduce commenting and like, and sort of like changing Newsfeed from a read only interface that you would check once a day. One way to Something that you could, like, do stuff on that you can go and like, have conversations and you wouldn't have to leave newsfeed to have a complete Facebook session. And it just so happens that this ended up having this, like, outsized cultural impact. But it speaks to the power of like, icons as, like, as, like a, as a genre of human artifact that people then start to concentrate a ton of energy around it because it takes on all the meaning of a company, a product, a service, a way of doing things in the world. And I would have never kind of anticipated that being the case for that feature for the company.

I mean, it's also kind of. If you look at petroglyphs, do you ever. If you're on vacation somewhere and you can definitely find hands and hearts and suns and carved in stone thousands of years ago or hello, hieroglyphics. I get why we moved to words, but I love the idea that these symbols are just cross cultural.

Like emoji becoming part of our parlance felt so much more natural. It almost made the written word feel like a blip. And that we're kind of returning back to.

It's like, if you ever study art history, you know there's nothing new under the sun. Yeah, that's all been done.

Yeah.

Yeah. And maybe the medium is different.

Right.

But I think it's good to recognize that some of these things, like, have power because they're so old and have worked for so long. Time tested. And even if they were tiles or instead of pixels.

Yeah, like that. Now you've maintained a long career in tech. Like, you've worked across a variety of companies. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your decision to kind of continue working with teams that are building these new products, because I imagine it's. I imagine a really personal decision to be constantly applying your trade in new ways. And I find that, like, there's a lot of folks that I've encountered who have a tour of duty or they spend their time in technology and sometimes they reach a crossroads and they say, like, I don't know if I want to keep working in tech any longer. I would argue that you don't give yourself enough credit for staying in the arena and continuing to kind of like advance the field in your own unique way. What is it that kind of draws you back to this realm of work? What are the things that kind of tie together for you?

Thanks for asking that. I don't often stop to think about that so much. I feel as if I started working when I was 14 and I worked as a very, very junior part time design assistant at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is a science museum. And I used to use a thing called a phototypositor to make labels where you aligned each letter. And it seemed kind of magical at the time, sort of photographic technique. And then we had a stat machine so you could paste up the stuff, some stuff for exhibits. And I did that. And I worked for an amazing designer named Harry Laux, who I think like way undersung. But he went to Art center probably in the 60s, studied car design. He was from Ponca City, Oklahoma, just had such a lyrical spirit. Graduated from Art center and then worked for Charles Eames on the, I want to say the World's Fair. That must have been in the 60s, maybe an IBM exhibit or maybe just something that the Eames office was doing for the World's Fair. And I think he absorbed so much from that. And then he ended up in museum work. So I could see that he just had a love for printed ephemera and books and friendliness. And I still think often, probably not often enough. Thank you, Harry, just for being exposed. Like, I think that's when I knew, learned that graphic design existed. And they got Communication Arts magazine at work, which was amazing to me.

What was amazing about it, I have some ideas of what it was actually.

I think produced in Palo Alto, but it was a design competition of like the best of the best graphic design, sometimes on a theme, an annual awards issue. So it was really eye opening to me to see all this graphic design and stories about practitioners that kind of fed me into arts and graphic arts. And then after Apple, I just felt as if I would never have thought of myself that I might find job happiness at a Fortune 500 manufacturing company. It just wouldn't have. Wouldn't have dawned on me. It's like, thank you, Andy Herzfeld. You know, like luck and friendship fire. So much so after, I won't go through my resume, but after Apple, I followed Steve Jobs to Next and he said, why would you want to twiddle bits for the rest of your life and never make more than $20,000 when you could be the creative director of a Fortune 500 company, right? Meaning that next would become a Fortune 500 company. And so it was kind of hard to say. Well, what I learned was I would rather twiddle bits. That was his exact words. Probably more than being a manager.

See, turn of phrase, you know, still.

Sits somewhere in my head. I haven't forgotten that I can hear him say that. And I do make more than $20,000. But I kind of. I. I worked at Next, and then I segued. I decided to take a shot at working independently.

Yeah.

Which I did for a couple of decades. Yeah. And I thought, well, I'll try it for a year, and if I don't have any clients, I'll just get it. I'll get a job. And somehow it worked out. I mean, I always think I've both worked full time and I've worked independently.

Yeah.

And advantages. Different advantages to each.

How did you select clients or projects? Like, what were sort of like, the criteria that you were seeking out?

I think I was seeking. I had people that I could involve if I needed help, but I loved doing things that I could do myself, which honestly is a very Paul Rand model. And I was exposed to him at next. We were trying to get a logo for next, and Steve said, let's have a contest. And even then I knew that. I know it works in advertising, but I don't think having a Bake off is the way to get the best design work. But he suggested that we could hire, like, four or five different firms and pay them each 15,000 and then pick the. If we didn't get a logo out of it, we could pick the firm we wanted to work with. So I chose some, and probably because I'd seen their work in Communication Arts, and I knew who Paul Rand was, and I just. I loved his work. I mean, he did the UPS logo in Westinghouse, and I thought he was very thoughtful. I had read some of his writing in histories. Steve will say, yeah, I chose Paul Rand, but that's fine.

Yeah.

And Paul Rand said, yes, he would participate, but he would require $100,000 and to fly first class and stay at a nice hotel and present his work. And then later he said, and he would require, like, an additional thousands of dollars to print a presentation book. So we had these other guys who came and, you know, like, laid, you know, showed their stuff. And then we had Paul, and he made a beautiful book to show. This is what he did, a presentation book of the logo. And of course, we were blown away. He and Steve got along really well. He was feisty.

Yeah.

And argumentative, as was Steve.

Yeah. Did they respect each other in that way?

Yes. Especially after the fact. Although the only thing they didn't was Steve decided he would ask Paul to make him a business card. His own personal business card. Not this next one.

Right, right, right.

And Paul did that.

Yeah.

And I can't even remember. I think it was just type. And it said Stephen P. Jobs. And Steve said, you know, I like it, but I don't like where the period is after P. And Paul said, but that's. It's set the way it would be with lead type. You can't. It's not digital type. It's classic, and it's classy. And she's like, well, I don't like it. Move the period. And Paul wouldn't. So they never made the cards.

An impasse, as it turns out.

Right. But, you know, I learned a lot watching them interact, and I learned a lot about. Paul wasn't arguing for the sake of argument. He was arguing because he really thought that was the right thing to do. And even the four colors of next, Steve said, I like them all, but I don't like the yellow. It should be lighter. And Paul had chosen Pantone 1, 2, 3. And Steve wanted 109. And Paul was, you know, trying to explain how it was a little different.

Yeah.

It's like a deeper, sandier yellow. And Steve did get his way.

Yeah.

But I. I can see in Paul Rand's work, like, he said to me, I don't get it with all these, like, now there's like, thousands of typefaces. He's like, you only need five typefaces. You just have to know how to use them. Yeah. And I can see the exact, like, handful of Pantone colors he used over and over and over.

Yeah.

And I absolutely 100% use them. It's because he did all that work figuring out. I mean, not. Not slavishly devoted to them, but I see in his books and in different projects, you. You tend to see the same handful of colors.

Yeah. And they're like, they're tried and true to a certain degree. Right.

Yeah. Just to answer your question in a. It's fun to go off on tape different ways, but I like working. I. I like working with. With. I finally. Even when I was doing contract work, I always liked meeting new people and the teams and trying so hard to solve their problem and then not always even knowing if they used it or not. I mean, sometimes I would. Right, of course.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But different than when you're at a company and you're, like, following it through and you have more of an emotional attachment.

Yeah. It's a good point to.

It's your company.

Yeah.

But I always tried really hard because when you're a contractor, you're only as good as the thing you did yesterday.

Yeah.

So that's a good point. I always enjoyed that. But toward the end of when I. I worked at Pinterest for six and a half years and I went to Pinterest, and probably the last job I did was a logo. And I was excited about doing it. I'm not even going to say what it was, but I remember we presented and the day maybe on a Thursday, and at the end of the meeting, the CEOs there and head of marketing, they're like, oh, my God, we love them all. We just don't know which one to pick. Because I usually always. It's not an exact science show, and I don't ever want to include anything that you don't want. You know, there was that conventional wisdom of include something that's a throwaway, a red herring. Yeah. But then they'll pick it.

Yeah. You have to live with it.

So there I kind of floated out of that meeting. Yeah. Like, we like them all. We just need to figure out which one to choose by Monday. The CEO called and said, you know, we're not sure any of these is a future classic. And I thought, well, is your product a future classic? You know, it's like, it isn't just the mark. He's like, so could you do a few more? And I felt like I ended up making a deck with, like, Coca Cola and some of these marks that are total classics. And I said, like, can you imagine if you were just looking at that Coca Cola right now? Wouldn't you say, does it look a little feminine? And is it a little hard to read? It's like you can pick anything apart. And it's because people like the product so much that I think that it's a. Partly it's the mark, and it's the experience of using the product.

Right.

And we kind of. Maybe I massage them. They did pick something and they did use it good. And it ended okay. But then I sort of. That experience made me think, maybe I'd rather just have a job.

Yeah.

And work for the same company. And so I went back to sort of having a good experience working with a team. Sometimes people say, like, why do you work? And then I think, well, isn't it.

Like, the most annoying question, like. Or like, in the pantheon if people.

Ask you that, like, you can get your island and not have to work.

In the pantheon of annoying questions, it's like. It's like, why do you need meaning in your life?

Well, I remember running into somebody, like, years ago in Whole Foods in Palo Alto, and I had just come Back from doing some job on the Peninsula. And I was driving out to the city. Yeah. And she said, I think we both had young children. And she said, why are you working? And I thought, hello, mortgage. You know, like. Like it wasn't just like a labor of love. And she didn't have that constraint in her life, but not everybody does. So I, like, I think it feels fun to be part of something that's about what's happening now in tech and a little AI working on. Yeah, just some things that are, like, evolving now. It's kind of fun as opposed to watching from the sidelines.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I like working with people who have experience and have grown up. You know, maybe they haven't heard of Devo. I had that experience the other day. Do you know who Devo is?

What is Devo? Is this a millennial thing? Stop. What?

Come on.

I don't know what Devo is. Diva. The hats. You know, what is that? I need some hair to explain to me what a diva is.

Well, I did. I mean, I had this thing where I said to this, this product manager, I can't even remember what we were talking about, but I said, yeah, it'll be like, kind of like Devo. And then he looked at me blankly and I realized, oh, it was a band and, oh.

This is like a tick tock reel. Oh, yeah, I've heard this song. Yeah. Yeah. But is. Are they a one hit wonder?

No, they still tour.

What are the other songs?

And they had. This is we are Devo. You know, it was. They were just kind of like goofy.

And we definitely need to include this.

Okay.

I am very happy. Thank you.

Thank you for playing that. Thank you for not.

I'm very happy to be outside the Devo circle.

But you know what? It's good because I want to listen. It's not like I want to listen to what the young people listen to, but it's fun to chat about work with other people that are working on it.

Do you feel like your approach to design has evolved with it? Like, as you've kind of moved across different companies, different contexts, worked with more and more teams, and you sort of had the benefit of having, like, more case studies at your disposal to compare against and contrast. Has that reshaped the way you approach the work that you do?

I mean, I wouldn't say turned it upside down because I'm such a still probably annoying proponent of simplicity and clarity and, you know, all these kind of unsexy but fundamental things. And like, look at that ui. How Many pairs of arrows can you possibly have on a screen at once? Like, get rid of all gratuitous arrows. But, yeah, I mean, I feel like it's great to be able to absorb things from all corners and how people present. I think the experience, like, kind of adds up in a good way.

Yeah.

Without. I don't feel as if I'm close to. Oh, yeah, I saw that five years ago.

Yeah.

Or I try not to be like that.

Right. Yeah. And there will be rhyming that sometimes you sort of see things go in vogue that were in vogue some previous cycle, and they kind of rhyme with each other. But it often feels like, at least to me, founders feel like record collectors. They feel like they're listening to a lot of music along with producing new music, and they're sort of formulating a taste, an applied taste, while also consuming a lot simultaneously. And I find that, like, great founders are great curators of the things that they collect. And sometimes they will point you to the thing that might be really big before it's really big. You know, there's a. It's. It's another form of luck.

Do you happen to know Judy Estrin? Does that name? She. She worked on, like, the founding of the Internet, I think, long time ago and wasn't an engineer at ucla.

Okay.

And I think her parents were both engineers. Can't quite remember the story. And she founded several startups and was the CTO at Cisco for a while. So I feel as if she's very wise and very knowledgeable. She sort of posits that for the longest time, maybe even now, a lot of new things are really on the shoulders of the Bell labs in the 60s because they had skunk works and they had time where smart people could just tinker. And they were not expected to come up with a product and turn a profit in 18 months.

Right. But they had an applied environment in the form of a monopoly. And I always thought that that was one of the things that I know most people will not view as romantic, but they always talked about the system, and I always loved that there was this, like, adherence to the system and this notion that, like, this basic research could potentially yield some new materials, some new methodology, some new technology that we can incorporate into the system and find out and practice whether or not it's useful. And so it wasn't completely divorced either from.

Yeah. Oh, that is. That is true. It probably just didn't have maybe the time constraint.

Right.

Or.

Yes. That it had a benefactor that can kind of give it the Patience. It needs to bear fruit.

Like, I love the idea. I wish there was more of that sometimes that great tinkerers and like idea people. I mean, maybe that's who's at startups now.

Right.

But I always kind of wish that there was freedom to think of some things that would. I guess I'm so pro science that we don't need to talk about politics. But I do think great thinkers and tinkerers come up with unbelievable things in medicine and science too, not just tech.

Yeah.

But it's kind of. I'm sure people always say this, it's an exciting time, but I don't know anywhere near enough about AI, but it does seem really interesting.

Yeah.

So it's like, it does seem like an interesting time to be working. I'm not sure I want to be working in a job, a full time job when I'm 90, but. But it's fun to be part of a collective venture.

Yeah.

And I love doing things on my own too and making art and painting my snakes and you know, that kind of thing. But you can sometimes make progress and have the interactions with colleagues.

Yeah.

I think sometimes when I'm the happiest heading home at the end of the day, it's from having a great conversation.

Yeah.

And to make a circle. That was what that books event was like.

Yes.

Before I knew it, the time had flashed by.

Yeah.

So it was really.

There's a neat camaraderie, I think to software design that I feel like is very unique to the field. I can't quite put my finger on, but there's a common ethos.

It was a different kind of evening though than just running into people at a bigger event kind of thing. So maybe it was the scale of it was good and I thought people were very thoughtful about what books they brought and I spent some time looking at those books. That was great. And yeah, he said maybe there'll be another one.

I hope so.

That would be good.

When you look back on your time at Pinterest and you compare it to your time at Apple and just in general, like with the creative teams, what are the commonalities in terms of culture? I love pattern matching. I love finding ways in which to kind of surface new patterns, new analogies. And one that I'm always looking for is the ways in which accomplished designers express. I found the right environment or I was able to do better work than I even expected given these circumstances. And looking back on it, these were the ingredients that sort of seemed fundamental to producing work that I can look back on with pride and say like, yeah, that was hard. Or that was ambiguous, but we did a great job.

It's hard for me when I think back about being at Apple one. I was the only designer in a software group, so it wasn't a design organization. And I reported to the head of the software group the same as anybody else.

Yeah.

So there was a software librarian. So she was not a programmer either, although she knew how to be a software librarian.

Yeah.

And there was a slogan. Real programmers arrived just in time for lunch. And that tended to be the case. Like people would kind of get there.

The quiet mornings.

Yeah, around the end of the morning, let's say noon. And then we would all pile into a few cars and go out for lunch together.

Right.

And to Veevees, which was Middle Eastern place in Cupertino or all kinds of different places, sushi. And we would go out and talk about work and then we would come back and start working maybe at like 1 or 2. And then because we didn't start till then, pretty much worked into the night, like and sometimes really late into the night and were able to put on loud music. And there was a Defender machine and I did not. I'm not really a gamer, I didn't play Defender. But there was Joust and I don't know if you've ever heard of that game, but it had kind of birds and egg waves and like sometimes I think, no wonder I liked it. It's all this like feminine energy in it. But. But people would play the games and drink odwalla and listen to music and I never felt, I think, as at home and creative in a workplace. And you had a cubicle so you could bring things in and you know, the era of just like a desk had not. It wasn't an office with a door, but you had your space and people had things. I had a lot of robots and toys and things that I liked.

And do you think fun is an essential ingredient to creating the camaraderie and the spirit necessary to do great things?

I think it was fun, but it wasn't contrived fun. You know, it wasn't like on Severance, you know, when he comes in with the little like the fun cart. It wasn't like that at all. It was being really united in a common goal. And I think we really, really drank the Kool Aid that we were doing something that could have a long lasting impact.

Yeah. And you did.

I can't stand that phrase, change the world because you hear it every five seconds.

Yeah.

Now, so that in storytelling, right?

Yeah, yeah. Is it because we just. Everybody is just trying to lay claim to prior greatness or is it because there's no new ideas or is it the wrong aspiration?

I don't know whether it's just the bar is high. So you want to be believing that whatever you're doing, it is going to be world changing and which will bring fame and fortune. But in truth, I think sometimes, like, small ideas are very good and little advancements are great. It's hard to like pull an example out of the air. But I mean, Steve honestly often said we're going to remember these days. And I just saw Andy Herzfeld on Friday because he came up for the Giants opener and we were laughing about that because it was the Mac. It's pretty recently. It was the Mac's 40th birthday and he had. He wanted to show me the Happy 40th Birthday Macintosh graphic that he had made with Doll E. And it really was like a good one. And I can show it to you. But it's like he was right. Like, we did remember those days. So in that way, probably that was even though it was so long ago. And I've had wonderful experiences working with all kinds of different people and on different projects. Loved it. Have hope. I made some work that was helpful. And at Apple, I don't know if it was the size of the team or softer group. Like, there was a basketball court right outside and people go out and there were some very good basketball players. Guy Kawasaki, great basket, really good basketball player. And like, I just enjoyed it. And it was a stage in my own life where I didn't have a family. Some people had kids, but most people were.

That was your tribe.

Yeah. The same age. And we were free to work really.

Long hours and you wanted to. What kind of calls?

I can think of one year when I was at the office, 364 out of 365 days, I was like always drawn. It was always fun to go in and see who is there. And you know, we even had things because I have these graphics, you know, Macintosh softball.

Yeah.

Because. Or picnic or. We obviously socialized with each other.

Right.

Even in discretionary time or some. I'm sure there were people that probably have different memories of it and maybe it was more like a job. But to me it was really.

For you personally, was there a moment where it tipped into like, this work's actually more important than even. I kind of gave it credence where like there's like a Sense of like, wait, actually, this is of great import.

Not at the time.

Not at the time. Was there a moment after launch where it was like, wow, actually, this is bigger than even I had ever kind of let myself imagine it to be.

Well, you know, the Mac wasn't very successful when it first came out, and it cost more and it didn't sell as well. And over time, there was, you know, it was fun to look at Mac World. Wow. There's a magazine about the Mac. And. Yeah, I remember meeting Steven Levy because he was writing.

Yes.

Writing something for. Oh, he wrote something for Rolling Stone about the Mac and now he's a good friend. But that seemed like, whoa, like, Rolling Stones interested in the Mac.

Yeah.

And. But definitely not at the time. Yeah, it was just, you know, it was like a good job and an interesting job and hoping it would be successful.

Yeah.

And, you know, it makes me. It makes me happy that. I mean, it does make me happy that Apple made pirate flags and Apple has shirts in its own store.

Yeah.

Someone said to me, like, in the last week, yeah, I started at Apple and I got, like, one of your T shirts. And I said, well, I haven't worked there in, like, 35 years. So he said, yeah, it had a happy Mac on it. And that made me happy. Like, it made me happy. Yeah, that woofs the dog. Cow maybe has a life of its own, but didn't name it. Mark Harlan named it.

Yeah. So, yeah, and it's a dog, but it's like a concept that sort of, like, has all this reuse.

Right. That's kind of fun. I mean, then I think, wow, I've been working, like, my whole life, and I would hate to think that it was. Isn't that Mark Zuckerberg who's like, yeah, people are only good at the beginning of their career and then they, like, don't have any ideas anymore. Did he say that?

I hope not, because you'll have to answer to that now that he's been around the blog, I think.

Yeah, I think. Yeah. Physician, heal thyself.

Yeah, but you're right, there's like, there's there's some. Some whimsy to, like, some of these early things that kind of keep reappearing in that, like, at least are touchdowns.

I mean, I don't know.

You.

You know, all these design. Do you think you need the energy of. Is like the energy of youth? I don't know the best energy.

I don't know if it's an energy thing. I sometimes wonder if there is, like, There's a power naivete. I feel like sometimes when you just.

Don'T know, you don't know that you can't do it.

Yeah. Sometimes if you just don't know what danger you're in, what the downsides are, or what's impossible, you're far more likely to try something that hasn't been tried before. And once it becomes obvious that it's doable, everybody races after it. But I find that that's sometimes, like, the thing that is so hard to kind of create a formula around, because it suggests that at the start, there is nothing. And then all of a sudden, there's like, a leap of faith, an intuition that kind of sprouts into the world. And that, to me, is what I find is so heartening, because it means that nobody has a head start. It means that somebody who's been doing it for decades and is the best at it, that notion is vulnerable to the person starting today. And that, to me, has always been. At least my recipe has always been, like, it's easy to be amongst the best if you're amongst the first. Very easy.

Well, it's 100% true. Like, when we were making icons for the Mac, you didn't have to think about, did somebody else use this?

Yes. Thank you for this conversation. You have always been an inspiration to me, not just in terms of, like, your work, but the way you carry yourself in this world. And if there's, like, a consistent thread across all the years is that people admire you for your humility and your generosity of spirit. And I just feel lucky to be in your orbit. So thank you.

Back at you. Thank you. I so appreciated your tracking me down. And it's been fun to have our paths across.

Yeah.

Like, again, let's keep doing it. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you, Susan.

Thank you. Sa.