Pinterest hires early Apple designer Susan Kare

Pinterest has hired designer Susan Kare, the graphic artist famously behind many of Apple’s early fonts and icons, including those on the original Macintosh. At Pinterest, Kare will be serving as a product design lead, where the company says she’ll likely end up working on products like buyable pins, guided search, and app pins. Her first day was Monday, so Pinterest says there are “no specific projects to share yet.” But broadly speaking, she’ll be helping to refine Pinterest’s primary interfaces for discovering and saving content.

It’s a smart hire for Pinterest. For one, Kare has deep roots in Silicon Valley’s design world: she created icons, like the lasso and paint bucket, that are still around today, albeit in modern forms; her typeface Chicago, created for the original Macintosh, lived on long enough to be present on many of the first iPods. Beyond that, Kare has maintained a presence in the tech world, opening a design agency to handle work like the creation of icons for Facebook’s first attempt at Gifts. Basically, if you notice Pinterest up its iconography game in the near future, this is probably the reason why.