“Susan Kare never thought she’d be best known for designing icons for a living,” John Brownlee reports for Cult of Mac. “A high school friend of Andy Hertzfeld, who was leading up the Macintosh OS design team, Kare says the job was offered to her ‘serendipitously’ based on no more than her ability to draw some off-the-cuff icons on graph paper during her initial interview.”
“To say that Kare was good at drawing icons is an understatement. In fact, many of the icons she drew during her interview became mainstays of the Macintosh operating system,” Brownlee reports. “Perhaps one of the most interesting stories Kare tells in the video above is about why the Macintosh replaced the key with the Command key. Originally, all shortcuts in the Macintosh operating system were done with the key, but when Steve Jobs saw the dropdown menus, he screamed: ‘There are too many Apples! You’re using our logo in vain!'” Brownlee reports. “Looking for a replacement, Kare consulted a symbol dictionary and plucked a little known symbol used almost exclusively in Swedish campgrounds, the ⌘ symbol we all know and love today.”
Read more – and watch the video – in the full article here.