From bombs to trash cans, the initial Apple icons were created by artist Susan Kare, who stumbled into the brand new career path. Zachary Crockett of Priceonomics has an interview with the computer graphics pioneer. An excerpt:

“Kare was subsequently offered a fixed-length, part-time job designing fonts and icons for the Apple Macintosh; her business card read ‘HI Macintosh artist.’ She’d never worked on computer graphics before Apple, but quickly made strides to adjust to her new medium. ‘I remember I didn’t really know anything about digital typography, but I got as many books on it as I could,’ she recalls.

Kare found that pixels really weren’t that far removed from other forms of art — some of which dated back thousands of years:

‘I still joke that there’s nothing new under the sun, and bitmap graphics are like mosaics and needlepoint and other pseudo-digital art forms, all of which I had practiced before going to Apple. I didn’t have any computer experience, but I had experience in graphic design.’

When she began, Macintosh had no icon editor — just a way to ‘turn pixels on and off.’ But Hertzfeld soon sat down and worked out an icon editor that automatically generated the hex under the icons so that Kare could focus on the less technical aspects of her design work.

Usually, says Kare, the team would tell her what concepts they needed, and she would try to come up with a selection of things that might work; she’d try them out, and the final design would evolve from there. Her early icons drew inspiration from a wide range of sources — art history, wacky gadgets, and forgotten hieroglyphics.”