Marcus Mendes at 9to5Mac points to Susan Kare’s talk at this year’s Startup School, where she goes back through the icons and graphics she made for the original Macintosh. Y Combinator has the video up on YouTube.

Kare drew bitmaps on a grid, one pixel at a time, back when nobody had settled what any of this was supposed to look like. A surprising amount of it is still here. The Command key symbol is on the keyboard in front of me.

I go back and look at those original icons every so often, and what gets me is how much personality fit into so few pixels. Some of that was the constraint doing the work. The rest was her. I really enjoyed watching this.