Early Apple Designer Susan Kare Joins Pinterest's Creative Team
Matthew Lynley / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Pinterest has spent 2015 pulling repeatedly from the Apple well: weeks before this hire it brought in former Apple and Facebook engineer Scott Goodson to head its mobile platform and web teams, and co-founder Evan Sharp was already talking up the Apple Watch in his product thinking. Adding Susan Kare — the designer behind the classic Macintosh icon suite, whose work now hangs in modern art museums — extends that pattern from engineering into the creative team itself.
The hire lands amid organizational churn elsewhere in the company: head of partnerships Joanne Bradford's departure left Tim Kendall absorbing duties just months earlier, making visible, prestige design talent a useful counter-signal about where Pinterest is investing.
First-order effects
- Pinterest's creative team gains a graphical-interface pioneer whose icon work gave early computing its human face — an immediate credibility upgrade for the visual identity side of the product.
- The move deepens Pinterest's bench of ex-Apple talent alongside Goodson's platform group, concentrating Apple-trained craft in both engineering and design.
Second-order effects
- Rival consumer visual products must now compete for a shrinking pool of designers with comparable computing-history cachet, pushing signing power toward individuals whose names carry museum-level brand value.
- Kare's presence functions as a recruiting magnet: designers weighing offers can point to her role as evidence that Pinterest treats visual craft as a first-class function rather than a service layer to engineering.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — Apple alumni in platform roles, Google and Baidu search veterans like Li Fan arriving later to lead engineering — consumer internet companies are structuring themselves around imported design-and-search pedigree as a competitive moat, not just headcount.
- Design heritage becomes a marketable asset in its own right: a company can borrow legitimacy from the people who defined earlier computing eras to anchor its claim on the next interface shift.
The trend: Consumer visual-internet companies are assembling competitive identity through marquee hires from the companies that defined earlier computing eras, with Apple alumni as the most prized source.