Which brings us to the story of the ‘The Steve Icon’; one day way back in February 1983 Susan Kare was busy creating icons for the Finder. Those were simple icons, only 32 by 32 black or white pixels or 1024 dots in total. It was said Kare would also draw lots of other images as well, for either practice or just for fun, usually reflecting her somewhat playful sense of humor. Then in the spur of the moment she took it upon herself to start drawing a portrait of Steve Jobs – no small task within such a tiny space, but somehow Susan succeeded in crafting an instantly recognizable likeness with a mischevious grin that captured a lot of Steve’s personality. It was reported that Jobs himself approved of the icon. Before long other members of the Mac team came to Susan requesting that they too be forever immortalised in 32 by 32 pixels – it became a Mac team status symbol to be iconified.

Kare left Apple around the same time as Jobs and went on to become the 10th employee at his new company NeXT – where she undertook the role of creative director. One of her first projects was to oversee the design of the NeXT logo for which she hired her idol the great Paul Rand. Nowadays as a freelance user interface graphic designer, she works for some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Electronic Arts, Facebook, IBM, Sony Pictures, Motorola and Microsoft. In recent interviews she has stated that over the past 10 years, she has drawn more than 2,000 icons.

No mean feat – even for the lady who had a hand in making Steve Jobs an icon, in both a metaphorical and a literal sense.