From Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes post about GUI pioneer Susan Kare, who gave computer code a friendly face, creating many of the iconic images for the Apple Macintosh:

“The challenge of designing a personal computer that ‘the rest of us’ would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

After taking painting lessons as a young girl and graduating from New York University with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare moved to the Bay Area, where she took a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. But she quickly felt like she was on the wrong side of the creative equation. ‘I’d go talk to artists in their studios for exhibitions,’ she recalls, ‘but I really wanted to be working in my studio.’

Eventually Kare earned a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel. That was the project she was tackling in her garage in Palo Alto when she got a call from a high-school friend named Andy Hertzfeld, who was the lead software architect for the Macintosh operating system, offering her a job.” (Thanks Browser.)