Susan Kare is in the spotlight at the Lyon printing museum, the opportunity to discover the atypical work of this American graphic designer.

Part of our daily lives

Susan Kare is one of those graphic designers whose work everyone knows, but not by name or face. Since the computer entered our lives, her creations have been part of our daily lives: employed at Apple in 1982 to “humanize” the first Macintosh, she created the icons that we all use daily and is thus considered a pioneer of pixel art.

A pionneer of pixel art

The first international retrospective of this iconographer, the exhibition looks back on all the facets of her creation, her inspirations and the undeniable visual influence of her work on our digital life; the opportunity for a real world tour of icons in images, from Lisbon to Seoul, passing through Japanese coats of arms or video games. On this occasion, the museum wishes to highlight the work of women in the graphic industries from the 1900s to today.

A digital sign language

When Andy Hertzfeld, her high school friend from Philadelphia, contacted her for an interview at Apple, Susan Kare immediately pulled out her gridded sketchbook and pens. Discover how Susan Kare used her artistic background to design a universal, playful, joyful grammar and visual vocabulary, and how this language, this digital sign language, would mark her era and the history of design. The icons and fonts imagined by Susan Kare will serve as models and standards for imagining the interfaces of many computer models and websites. A work that will even enter the museum, and more precisely in the prestigious collections of MoMA in New York.

The Geek culture of the 80’s

After Apple, She put her talent and creativity at the service of other giants like Facebook or more recently Pinterest. The Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication in Lyon offers him his first retrospective. The exhibition, fun and instructive, is also a dive into geek culture from the 80s to the present day. The icons created by the graphic designer have become part of our intangible cultural heritage: easy to print, draw and imitate, they have captured the eyes of millions of people. They also come to life on multiple occasions in the public and private spaces around us.

Exhibition Until September 18, 2002

Museum of Printing and Graphic Communication

13 rue de la Poullaillerie, 69002 Lyon – Wednesday to Sunday, 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. https://www.impressionie.lyon.fr/fr/susan-kare