The Macintosh (1984)

The Macintosh 128K had a specific problem to solve in 1984. Computers were for programmers. The Apple II had found a market with hobbyists and businesses running spreadsheets, but the people who made things look good — designers, art directors, paste-up artists — had no use for a machine that showed nothing but green-on-black text. Jef Raskin, the Apple engineer who started the Mac project in 1979, had a different idea. He wanted a computer that ordinary people could learn to use in minutes, with a screen that showed you what you were making.

Raskin was pushed out of the project by Steve Jobs in 1981. Jobs accelerated the schedule, raised the price, and changed some of the technical specifications — but kept the core proposition. When the Mac launched at the Flint Center on 24 January 1984, it had a 9-inch monochrome screen running at 512 × 342 pixels and 72 ppi. The 72 ppi figure was not arbitrary. It matched the 72 points per inch of traditional typesetting measurement, which meant that a point of type on screen occupied exactly one pixel. What you saw was what you got.

Susan Kare joined Apple in January 1983 and built the visual language the Mac needed. She drew 32 × 32 pixel icons on graph-paper grids — a trash can, a hand, a floppy disk, a bomb — and designed the first family of proportionally spaced bitmap typefaces: Chicago for the system interface, Geneva, Monaco, and New York for different typographic roles. Chicago ran the Mac’s menu bar for fifteen years.

Bill Atkinson wrote QuickDraw, the graphics engine inside the Mac’s ROM that rendered text and images to the screen, and MacPaint — the application that demonstrated what a bitmapped canvas could do for drawing. For many early users, MacPaint was where the Mac’s promise became tangible.

On its own, the Mac was a compelling visual tool but not yet a design production environment. That changed in January 1985 when Apple announced the LaserWriter — a 300 dpi PostScript laser printer at $6,995 — alongside Aldus PageMaker, released the following July by Paul Brainerd’s Aldus Corporation in Seattle. The combination of Mac, LaserWriter, and PageMaker is what triggered the desktop- publishing revolution. Brainerd coined the phrase. Within two years it described an industry.

The desktop-publishing revolution is often described as democratisation — and it was. Small organisations that could not afford commercial typesetting or paste-up could now produce newsletters, catalogues, and annual reports on a desk, by one person, for the cost of a Mac, a LaserWriter, and a PageMaker licence. By 1987 an estimated 5 million pages a day were being printed by desktop-publishing software.

The disruption ran in the other direction as well. Traditional typesetters — trained specialists who set type using phototypesetting machines — saw their trade evaporate in roughly a decade. Commercial paste-up artists, strippers, and repro houses contracted sharply. The skills that had taken years to acquire were no longer the gating factor in production. The gating factor was now software knowledge and visual judgement.

Within the design profession, the Mac changed what designers did with their time. Comping layouts by hand, specifying type for the typesetter, making corrections with Tipp-Ex and a scalpel — all of that compressed or disappeared. Designers spent more time on screen, less at the drawing board. The applications shaped habits of thought: PageMaker’s columns and gutters, QuarkXPress’s master pages, Illustrator’s Bezier paths. Some designers felt these defaults homogenised the output; the Emigre magazine and the work coming from the Cranbrook Academy were in part a response to the sterility of default-settings design.

Susan Kare’s contribution sits at the centre of a longer story. The iconographic vocabulary she established for the Mac — visual metaphors for file management, tools, and system states — became the convention that every subsequent GUI has worked within or against. The desktop metaphor, the folder hierarchy, the toolbar full of tool pictograms: these are Kare’s framework, built on a 32 × 32 pixel grid with a $2.50 graph-paper notebook.