Pang: There are a number of pictures that show up in the Apple manuals and promotional literature-- the pair of tennis shoes, the Japanese woman combing her hair--
Kare: Gourmet baby food--
Pang: -- and my understanding is that you drew most, if not all, of these.
Kare: Well as I said, there weren't many alternative sources of Macintosh art at the time!
Pang: Are there any stories behind the choice of those images?
Kare: You know, I think a lot of it worked with the ad agency on some of those. I know I drew the running shoe after Steve Hayden wrote the copy. I can't remember with the baby food; maybe Chiat/Day came up with the idea of having baby, but I can't really remember. Sometimes I created imaged that they could use as they saw fit.
With the Japanese lady, Bill Atkinson was experimenting with scanning, and Steve brought in an actual woodcut that he had bought: it was big and colorful, and that was one of the first things that we scanned. And I took the scan, which was kind of rough, and refined it to make the final illustration. It looks so crude now-- in terms of scanning technology-- but it seemed amazing at the time that you could get a "real" image into your computer.
Some of those images that ended up in the advertising or manuals were made on request. We did some columns because they needed to being able to show flipping horizontal, and I tried to think of things that would work for that. And we recycled some of the stuff into other places. The same thing when we wrote the "Hello" for the magazine insert. I can't remember if that "Hello" was originally a request from Chiat/Day, or from Tom Hughes and his group in Creative Services at Apple. But Tom Hughes, and Clement Mok, and Ellen Romano were the main art team in Creative Services, and Tom Suiter was the head of Creative Services, they were also requesters. I would just try to give everybody what they asked for. But I did have a fair amount of freedom, because often they would just say, "We need an illustration."
I remember Clement Mok had the idea for one illustration that was an isometric view of a kitchen; he had shown me a nice illustration of an isometric kitchen, and I had the idea of putting the robots in. They used that as sample art to show how to use different tools.
Pang: We've interviewed Andy Cunningham, Barbara Krause, and other people in Apple or Regis McKenna who worked on the event marketing, the sneaks, working with journalists, and I wanted to get a sense of what it was like to be the subject of that, to be one of the people who was part of the photo shoot with the photographer who worked with Fleetwood Mac, or in the Steven Levy article in Rolling Stone, or appearing at MacWorld. What was that like?
Kare: Extremely secondary to working on the project itself. I remember some of it being fun and different-- I wasn't a member of the key design team, so those people would probably be better able to answer that. But it wasn't something that took a lot of time; those aren't the main memories I have of working in that group. It just wasn't that big a deal.
Pang: So did the Marketing or McKenna people do background stuff with you before events?
Kare: I don't even remember that much about it. I remember being in a couple photo shoots, and that was interesting. The Rolling Stone photographer was very good, and because I'm in graphics it was interesting for me to see how people like that work. Mostly what I remember was being in my cube [Pang laughs], and trying to get done what needed to be done.
Pang: There have been various accounts of relations between the Mac group and the rest of the whole, particularly the Apple and Lisa people. Did you have much contact with other people elsewhere in Apple, other than in Marketing and Creative Services?
Kare: Not that much in my realm, but I don't remember there being much animosity. I made friends in other parts of Apple.
The one incident I can explain, because I was there, was that sometimes people thought the pirate flag was some kind of declaration of war. Actually, we had had a Mac offsite, and at every offsite, Steve would get up and write some slogans on an easel that were relevant to what was going to be talked about at the offsite. One was "Let's be pirates, not join the navy;" another was "Real artists ship;" and I can't remember what the third one was. When Steve Jobs had introduced that notion of "let's be pirates," he meant, let's have a renegade feeling to our group, we can move fast, we can get things done; it was not anti-anybody-- it was the notion of having the advantages of a small company.
When we got back, Steve Capps sewed that pirate flag, and I painted the skull and crossbones with the Apple in one eye. One night we climbed up-- which was kind of exciting!-- to the top of the building and put that flag up. It was for the Mac group-- to remind people of Steve's talk at the offsite.