Quite literally, millions of people encounter the graphic art of Susan Kare every day. Many more will experience her unusual work in the months ahead. Kare's carefully crafted images have won a place among the cultural symbols of our age, yet few people know her name or where her work can be seen. Only a handful of industry insiders know that Kare is the artist responsible for the graphic appearance of some of the country's best-known computer software.

"I hoped to help counter the stereotypical image of computers as cold and intimidating," says Kare, who is more commonly known as the "Queen of Icons".

Kare is considered one of the most highly respected pixel artists and iconists in the business. Not only is she responsible for many of the original Mac and Windows icons as well as the designing of typefaces such has Chicago and Geneva fonts, Kare has designed for IBM, Intel, Song, Motorola, Nokia and Yahoo!.

Kare began her career in the world of icons at Apple after she received a call from a former high school friend who happened to be one of Apple’s original Macintosh programmers. With her fine arts graduate, Kare left her job as a museum curator and as she says "the rest is history".

"Pixels have and always will be a part of my life" says Kare, who is now considered the pioneer of computer iconography. She is renown for her ground breaking pixel art and icons that have lasted the test of time, many of which we still see and use today. Her favourites include the Windows' moving watch, paintbrush and the iconic trash can, with a particular soft spot for the Macintosh bomb, used to alert users of imminent danger to the system.

Kare is also responsible for the beloved Windows’ Solitaire, where she designed the cards that are still being used today.

"I still spend my days turning dots on and off," says Kare, but to her computer iconography is less about the use of complicated, technological characters and more about creating metaphors. She says the idea behind an icon is to provide users with a symbol which is immediately understood and remembered. "As visual communicators we often work with and rely upon metaphors to provide a message that triggers emoticon, actions, and reactions from an audience and we achieve this through imagery and words," she says. "I’m a great admirer of images that convey a clear meaning at a glance. I still believe in the tenet that 'simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible'."

"Simplification, organisation and the distillation of elements are qualities always at play; with clarity, simplicity and usability as the goal. Just because you have a million colours, it doesn’t necessarily make sense to use as many as possible every time."

"I would say an icon is successful if you can tell someone what it is once and they don’t forget it. Some icons are easy because they’re nouns: a calendar, for example," Kare says. "But verbs are hard to do. Undo is especially hard. I struggle year in and year out with undo."

So next time you decided to browse some artwork, why not check out deviantART’s own Icon Gallery, where artists produce more and more talent everyday. And don't forget to stop and look at deviantART’s very own icons. Whilst we use these on a daily basis, we perhaps tend to overlook these pieces of fine art and forget how valuable they really are. Be sure to recognise the artist involved in their creation such as ¢starvingartist and ¢eStunt.

And remember, icons are much more than just a few pixels.

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