Apple is a company that worships design. Every single pixel is crafted on an Apple device, and that got us thinking, how did they come up with the command icon?
Susan Kare, the iconic icon designer, who created many of the symbols for the first Mac has an interesting story to tell. She created the Smiling Mac icon and the trashcan, but is also credited for many generic UI icons, such as the floppy disk and various paint application icons.
Kare, at this year’s E.G. Conference in Monterey gave a talk recounting her career. The stories she shared were awe inspiring. From how she sketched out pixel art on notepads before there were any image-editing programs to how she designed the playing cards in Windows Solitaire. But the one that stood out was how she created the Apple command key.
She started out with a story shared by Andy Hertzfeld, of the original Mac team, years ago. Here’s the story,
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the “Apple key”; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu command. We displayed a little Apple logo on the right side of every menu item with a keyboard command, to associate the key with the command.
One day, late in the afternoon, Steve Jobs burst into the software fishbowl area in Bandley III, upset about something. This was not unusual. I think he had just seen MacDraw for the first time, which had longer menus than our other applications.
“There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!”
After we told him that we had to display the command key symbol with each item that had one, he told us that we better find a different symbol to use instead of the Apple logo, and, because it affected both the manuals and the keyboard hardware, we only had a few days to come up with something else.
It’s difficult to come up with a small icon that means “command”, and we didn’t think of anything right away. Our bitmap artist Susan Kare had a comprehensive international symbol dictionary and she leafed through it, looking for an appropriate symbol that was distinctive, attractive and had at least something to do with the concept of a menu command.
And then she found it – in Sweden. There, the Apple menu command symbol is actually used in street signs to indicate a point of interest or attraction in a campground.
She could’ve stopped there, and let the history of the Apple command symbol be as common as a street sign. But, she’s an Apple employee. So she researched more, to uncover what the symbol actually meant. One theory is that it is a luck cloverleaf, with four leaves. Another is a more closer relationship to a road sign, that the icon may mean a highway junction sign. The most likely answer, however, came from a fan who sent Kare a photo of a landmark in Sweden: the ruins of a castle in Borgholm.
There you go, mystery solved!