In the 1980s, artist Susan Kare put a human face on the Apple Macintosh, designing the icons and typefaces that revolutionized how we interact with computers.
Now she’s once again bridging the digital and physical worlds with a new collection of artwork, Esc Keys, previewed at London’s Asprey Studio as part of Frieze London ahead of its end November launch on the Asprey Studio website.
“I was a typical art kid who liked to paint and all kinds of crafts, and never imagined I would want to work for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company,” Kare said at the launch event for Esc Keys.
After studying art history and studio art, Kare was working in a store when a high school friend who was working as a programmer at Apple approached her for “a secret project he was working on,” she explained. “And one thing led to another, and I ended up with a job to do the graphics and icons for the Macintosh.”
As well as creating famous icons like the “Happy Mac” that greeted users when the Macintosh booted up, Kare was responsible for Apple’s famous Chicago typeface and the cards for Microsoft Windows Solitaire. She later went on to work as Creative Director at Steve Jobs’ NeXT and Pinterest.
Kare’s Esc Keys collection riffs on the pixel art style of her design work for Macintosh, with designs including an alien face, a tortoise, and a playful “panic!” button.
They’re all inscribed upon keyboard keys made of precious metals—which can either be worn as a necklace pendant, wall-mounted, or inserted into an actual mechanical keyboard. Alongside the physical objects, the artworks are also available in digital form, as NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals.
“On the keys, they're reminders of things you should be doing instead of being at the keyboard,” Kare told Decrypt. “The idea of this fantastic level of craftsmanship really appealed to me, because I'm kind of interested in off the screen, onto objects, but being able to have these crafted,” she explained, adding that “it’s just so tough” to render the blocky pixels accurately on a physical object.
Kare added that one of the challenges of the design process was taking concepts and rendering them as abstract icons, explaining, “It’s something like a haiku.”
“A lot of it was just thinking about some of these concepts, and maybe trying not to be too complex,” she said. “You think about the things that are on the keyboard, like the pound sign and the at sign—they’re definitely symbols, not illustrations,” she explained. In creating the new Esc Key icons, she said, “I thought they would seem more authentic and make more sense if it was just some things you could see at a glance.”
“Some things were much easier than others,” she said. “We wanted ‘kindness’ or ‘caring,’ and even Googling, everything was just a heart, or hands, or hands holding a heart, or hands making a heart.” Instead, Kare opted for a design depicting a watering can and a sapling. “That seemed like a caring or generous thing that wasn’t too treacly or cliché,” she explained.
This isn’t Kare’s first NFT artwork—she previously created "White Rose," a 1,000-edition pixel art piece, the proceeds from which were donated to the Stop AAPI Hate organization.
Asprey Studio, meanwhile, is “very much Web3 embedded,” its Chief Creative Officer Alastair Walker told Decrypt. “We have a members club, which is NFT token-gated, with only 180 members,” he said, adding that the studio is building a “state of the art workshop” in Kent. “It’s all about creating digital and physical collections,” Walker said.
For her part, Kare plans to continue working in the pixel art style that’s become indelibly associated with her. “I love pixels, you know,” she said. “And I still like the idea of what you can make with black and white and 32x32. Give me 16x16 and a concept, we’ll come up with something.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward