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While she was a struggling young artist in San Francisco in the early 1980s, Susan Kare picked up a typeface design gig for an up and coming company called Apple Computers. She designed the first proportionally spaced digital font, and it greatly pleased Steve Jobs. So Kare stayed on and designed many graphic elements for the Macintosh interface, including popular icons still used today. At the link, Steve Silberman tells her story and shares pages from her sketchbook. Jobs didn’t accept some of her more whimsical icons, such as a squashed spider, a jumping frog, and a high-heeled cowboy boot.
Link -via American Digest | Kare’s Website
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Mike Mitchell is no stranger to Neatorama, since his paintings of Brobocop and the Parks and Recreation cast in Casablanca, have graced our pages before. So, as soon as I saw the gallery at BuzzFeed I just had to share.
This guy knows how to paint beloved pop culture icons like you’ve never seen them before, and his images are like eye candy to me-I always crave more, and I just can’t get enough!
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This artwork by Grégoire Guillemin contains lots of pop culture icons. How many do you recognize? I didn’t count, but most of them are familiar enough. Some are for sale. See larger images at Guillemin’s gallery (which contains just a couple of spoilers). Link -via Buzzfeed
There are pictures we are all familiar with, but who are the people in the pictures? Some of the most famous images are those of people who had nothing to do with the photograph’s fame, and some weren’t even aware of them. Like Geraldine Doyle, who was well aware of the Rosie the Riveter poster seen everywhere during World War II, but had no clue that her face was the inspiration for it -until 1984!
Doyle, incredibly, had no idea of her connection to Rosie the Riveter. In fact, she didn’t even know about the original inspirational photo, which given her posture, lends an unsettling peeping-Tom vibe to the whole thing. At the time, she’d just graduated high school and, like many other women, had taken a job in a factory in order to support the war effort. American Broach & Machine Co. had her on a metal press in no time at all, probably after a vigorous and thorough safety-training program that only that decade could deliver.
Fearing an injury that could impact her ability to play the cello, Doyle quit after only two weeks on the job. She endured the potential hand crushing long enough for a photographer to snap the picture without her noticing. Someone who did notice, however, was J. Howard Miller, an artist commissioned by the government to draw up some motivating pieces of art.
Read the rest of her story, plus those of other famous faces, at Cracked. Link
A couple of months ago we saw Wayne Dorrington’s retelling of Star Wars Episode IV using only icons. Now he has completed the the plot of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back in the same manner, which he calls “Iconoscope.” If the images aren’t showing up for you, click where they should be. Link -via Laughing Squid
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Susan Kare, a San Francisco-based computer iconographer who has “designed thousands of software icons that have become familiar to anyone who uses a computer”, has now made her famous classic Macintosh icons available as prints for all the Apple fans out there.
Link – via switched and technabob
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Artist Micah Schippa created a series of woven images of common computer icons. He calls his project “Tools-at-hand.”
Link via Make | Artist’s Website | Photo by the artist
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This illustration contains the names of 48 musical groups rendered as icons. Can you figure out the names of the bands? Click on the image at El Espíritu de los Cínicos to see the answers. Link -via Gorilla Mask
The symbolism of historic icons usually gets simplified over the years, and often co-opted by groups with their own agendas. Along the way, the actual history gets lost, which is the point of this Cracked article 8 Historic Symbols That Mean The Opposite of What You Think. Take, for example, the inverted cross that is sometimes used to symbolize satanism.
If those Satanists had paid attention in Sunday school, they would probably realize that the inverted cross is actually the personal trademark of Saint Peter, the first Pope, and one of the most revered figures in Catholic lore. When Peter was martyred by crucifixion he was said to have requested to be crucified upside down because he didn’t feel worthy of dying the same way as Jesus. As a result, many dyed-in-the-wool Catholics actually consider the inverted cross to be a more acceptable thing to attach to your tacky jewelry than a regular right-way-up one.
And there are seven other symbols that might surprise you. Link -via Gorilla Mask
Designing those little icons is tougher than you might think. Check out how designer Felix Sockwell went through the creative process (and the review process, of course) to come up with the icons for the New York Times app.
Link via Boing Boing
Heh! This is pretty neat: a set of 14hand drawn "doodle" icon set, including social media logos of digg, delicious, twitter, and so on by Chris Spooner of SpoonGraphics.
The best part about it is that they’re free for you to download! Link – via Fuel Your Creativity
