Dr Linda King
speaker
287 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Aug
Dr Linda King’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And she came up with the idea, or they came up with the idea together, and she realised it, of pictograms, of little symbols on a computer interface that make a computer easier to use.
Now, you're looking at your computer there.
You can probably see your folder.
You can probably see your bin.
So she took symbols from the real world that people understood from filing or the workplace and recreated visual versions of those on screen to make computers easier to use.
Exactly.
And she took her cue from mosaics because she had a PhD in art history by the age of 24 and needlepoint, which she was interested in.
So if you can imagine, a computer screen would have been very pixelated at
Yeah, and she used graphed paper to, you know, draw up her ideas.
And she also had the idea of the happy Mac, that when you booted up your Mac, you saw a little computer with a smiley face, which made it, again, more, you know, accessible to people.
not as intimidating.
Yeah, and I'm conscious that you had a piece about road safety earlier on and the importance of road signage.
So Margaret Calvert, British designer, the last two were American designers,
She's just out of college.
Her tutor is a guy called Jock Kinnear, who gets a commission to design the signage for all the roads around Britain in 1963.
And she works with him.
And she designs, they design together a typeface called Transport, which is used all over the UK, which is really what we use a version of today.
Right.
But neither of them could drive at the time.
But they said that the signage, which was very, very muddled in Britain at the time, had to be seen if you were travelling at 70 miles per hour.
Showing 81–100 of 287 · page 5 of 15
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