Susan Kare designed the suite of icons that made the Macintosh revolutionary
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderSadly, the icon garden was closed by 1997 as part of Job's reinvention of the company. It was a great place to meet and a public garden that Apple put in to get their Infinite Loop campus built in Cupertino. https://www.quora.com/Where-did-Apples-icon-garden-sculpture... Lots of employees were shocked and a bug report went around after they went missing... something like "missing icons on reboot. Still missing after finder recovery." Before there was the android version garden... there were the mac icons…
I love this video of Kare giving an introduction to the Mac interface on "Computer Chronicles" back in 1984 [1]. At first it seems quaint to see how slowly and carefully she explains what we now consider to be basic UI features. But then you realize that for many people in the world, a desktop computer is just as strange and confusing to them now as it was to most people back then. I think some of us (me included)…
A story about Susan Kare I enjoy: https://www.folklore.org/Steve,_Icon.html > It became a Mac team status symbol to be iconified by Susan.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 578
- Total comments
- 113
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-04-19 | Susan Kare, the Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile | jonahb | 1 | 0 |
| 2018-04-20 | Susan Kare designed the suite of icons that made the Macintosh revolutionaryFirst breakout · Best thread | matt4077 | 423 | 74 |
| 2021-06-05 | The Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile (2018)Latest 20+ point return | superfunny | 151 | 36 |
| 2025-07-17 | A Woman Who Gave the Macintosh a Smile | msephton | 3 | 3 |