That's a good question. It's Andy Hertzfeld who told me she was the first true artist in the computer industry and I've heard him say it a lot. Somebody had to design the icons at Parc tho. https://blogs.plos.org/neurotribes/2011/11/22/the-sketchbook...

I think Alvy Ray Smith did a lot of those [1]. Dealers of Lightning has a bit more on the story. He then went on to join the NYIT graphics folks with Ed Catmull, and went out to California for the Lucasfilm (and later, Pixar) work.

Alvy Ray Smith never got a fine arts degree, but he's definitely done art for most of his career, including exhibitions. "True artist" almost sounds like a way to exclude these types :).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvy_Ray_Smith

Susan Kare is not an artist but a graphic designer. She doesn't claim to be an artist herself.

Why must they have? Part of what distinguished the Mac GUI from PARC’s is the former’s refinement, elegance, and whimsy, contributed in large part by Kare.

Yet they did, in the person of David Em: https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/graphicshistory/chapter/9-6...

Good find. I wonder if Andy Hertzfeld said one of the first and I misquoted him.

> Why must they have?

Because PARC was an intentionally multi-disciplinary group working on the earliest incarnations of visual computing.

Also, no one is disputing that Susan Kare is highly accomplished and hugely influential.

Because any time you say some is "the first", you obviously looked at some sources to find who was the earliest one fitting some criteria. Relaxing the criteria and/or looking deeper is very likely to find someone else. But you can never win an argument either way, because the criteria are arbitrary. So many disputes boil down to definitions.