5 ms·

She is very talented, and has a good eye for proportion & shape. When you compare the classic black-and-white Macintosh to Amiga, GEM, OpenWindows, Windows 3.1

She is very talented, and has a good eye for proportion & shape. When you compare the classic black-and-white Macintosh to Amiga, GEM, OpenWindows, Windows 3.1, Windows 95 &c. you see that the Mac was head-and-shoulders above the rest.

monocasa 9y ago
Well, she did the icons for Windows too. There was a lawsuit over that.
- sambeau 9y ago
  She did lots of icons for Windows 3 and card deck too. http://kare.com/microsoft/ http://kare.com/microsoft/ She was creative director at NeXT, and was a founder of Easel so did icons for Nautilus on Linux. She worked on OS/2 for IBM. Essentially she has had a big say in the look & feel of every desktop operating system.
  - toxican 9y ago
    It's a shame her Windows 3 icons aren't on there, I'd love to see those.
    - glhaynes 9y ago
      http://toastytech.com/guis/win30.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win30.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html I'm not sure what is her work and what isn't aside from the Solitaire cards.
  - qplex 9y ago
    Eazel (with a z) was the company that originally developed Nautilus. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
wenc 9y ago
Amiga Workbench and GEM [1] icons, fonts and chrome were some of the most aesthetically unpleasant designs ever. The proportions were all stretched out, and the icons were mostly ugly. With Kare's icons, even the pixelation looked cute. [1] I was briefly enchanted with GEM because it made my DOS machine look and feel like a Mac, but when I compared it to an actual Mac it looked horrible. This is what GEM looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/media/File:Gem1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/... And this is what System 1 (original Mac OS) looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Mac...
- jcadam 9y ago
  As a child, when I first saw that garish blue and orange color scheme of the pre-2.0 Amiga Workbench, I thought: "Why would anyone do that?"
- reaperducer 9y ago
  Heck, even GEOS looked better than GEM. The Amiga desktop was such a missed opportunity. Take the first mass-market computer capable of high-resolution graphics in 4,096 colors and make the icons... wait for it... black, white, and orange on a blue background. A friend of mine who was legally blind had an A1000. I sometimes wonder if it was only for the icons.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    There's a reason for that color scheme. The OG Mac had a built-in, sharp, monochrome CRT. The Amiga was designed to be usable with whatever TV happened to be lying around. Hence the complementary pairs of black and white, and blue and orange: the only colors that would read well on the oldest, grottiest, junkiest b&w or color TVs. If you were editing HAM images in Deluxe Paint, obviously you'd want a high-quality monitor for that. But if you didn't have a high-quality monitor, the basic system UI would at least degrade well to be usable with what you had. Function over form is a part of the Amiga design. Its graphical shell is called "Workbench" and not "Desktop" -- it was thought of as a computer for engineers and makers who were willing to forgo prettiness for practicality.
starsinspace 9y ago
AmigaOS 1.x [0] is to me one of the most pleasant looking UIs ever. I'm sure my view is also influenced by nostalgia, but still, I love the color scheme, and then icons. It's a shame they replaced the colors with a grey-in-grey nothingness starting in OS version 2. Guess that just shows that one can't argue about taste :-) [0] http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1wb13.png http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1wb13.png
- jjuhl 9y ago
  I grew up with that (workbench 1.3) and loved it. Clearly understandable icons and a colour scheme that (to me) seemed pleasant. Loved it back then and I still like it to this day.

monocasa 9y ago

Well, she did the icons for Windows too. There was a lawsuit over that.

sambeau 9y ago
She did lots of icons for Windows 3 and card deck too. http://kare.com/microsoft/ http://kare.com/microsoft/ She was creative director at NeXT, and was a founder of Easel so did icons for Nautilus on Linux. She worked on OS/2 for IBM. Essentially she has had a big say in the look & feel of every desktop operating system.
- toxican 9y ago
  It's a shame her Windows 3 icons aren't on there, I'd love to see those.
  - glhaynes 9y ago
    http://toastytech.com/guis/win30.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win30.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html I'm not sure what is her work and what isn't aside from the Solitaire cards.
- qplex 9y ago
  Eazel (with a z) was the company that originally developed Nautilus. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel

wenc 9y ago

Amiga Workbench and GEM [1] icons, fonts and chrome were some of the most aesthetically unpleasant designs ever. The proportions were all stretched out, and the icons were mostly ugly. With Kare's icons, even the pixelation looked cute. [1] I was briefly enchanted with GEM because it made my DOS machine look and feel like a Mac, but when I compared it to an actual Mac it looked horrible. This is what GEM looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/media/File:Gem1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Environment_Manager#/... And this is what System 1 (original Mac OS) looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Macintosh_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_1#/media/File:Apple_Mac...

jcadam 9y ago
As a child, when I first saw that garish blue and orange color scheme of the pre-2.0 Amiga Workbench, I thought: "Why would anyone do that?"
reaperducer 9y ago
Heck, even GEOS looked better than GEM. The Amiga desktop was such a missed opportunity. Take the first mass-market computer capable of high-resolution graphics in 4,096 colors and make the icons... wait for it... black, white, and orange on a blue background. A friend of mine who was legally blind had an A1000. I sometimes wonder if it was only for the icons.
- bitwize 9y ago
  There's a reason for that color scheme. The OG Mac had a built-in, sharp, monochrome CRT. The Amiga was designed to be usable with whatever TV happened to be lying around. Hence the complementary pairs of black and white, and blue and orange: the only colors that would read well on the oldest, grottiest, junkiest b&w or color TVs. If you were editing HAM images in Deluxe Paint, obviously you'd want a high-quality monitor for that. But if you didn't have a high-quality monitor, the basic system UI would at least degrade well to be usable with what you had. Function over form is a part of the Amiga design. Its graphical shell is called "Workbench" and not "Desktop" -- it was thought of as a computer for engineers and makers who were willing to forgo prettiness for practicality.

starsinspace 9y ago

AmigaOS 1.x [0] is to me one of the most pleasant looking UIs ever. I'm sure my view is also influenced by nostalgia, but still, I love the color scheme, and then icons. It's a shame they replaced the colors with a grey-in-grey nothingness starting in OS version 2. Guess that just shows that one can't argue about taste :-) [0] http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1wb13.png http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga1wb13.png

jjuhl 9y ago
I grew up with that (workbench 1.3) and loved it. Clearly understandable icons and a colour scheme that (to me) seemed pleasant. Loved it back then and I still like it to this day.