Really, susan kare is a talentless designer who did the bad icons before apple employed proper graphics designers. She only did the cheap stuff and the naff facebook gifts etc that are really very poor.
Nice that she did some iconic stuff but it's not that way because of its artistic quality but it's retro time frame and ubiquity.
Please, go find the current designers of the os icons (not the skeuromorphic ones) and i'd be interested to hear their stories.
She designed easy to comprehend B&W icons using a 32x32 pixel space before anything else had a gui to emulate. Unless you have actually tried doing that, ****.
----------
Designers today aren't working at the level of individual pixels, though. With those old, tiny, bitmapped icons, you can't render shapes, you have to get each pixel right by hand. They really just use different skills.
Yeah, you can't just create something at a convenient size and shrink it down to 32x32. Believe me, when I designed websites I tried. Creating tiny icons that look great and exactly what they are supposed to look like is a unique talent.
----------
Hear boy, FETCH!
Made me think of an awesome old screensaver. Bad dog!!
Bad Dog
I had Boris the cat, too.