Apple designer Susan Kare brings NFT ‘Esc Keys’ to Asprey Studio

In the 1980s, artist Susan Kare put a human face on the Apple Macintosh, designing the icons and fonts that revolutionized the way we interact with computers.

Now she is once again bridging the digital and physical worlds with a new collection of artworks, Esc Keys, launching at London’s Asprey Studio as part of Frieze London.

Esc keys. Image: Susan Kare/Asprey Studio

“I was a typical art kid who loved to paint and make all kinds of crafts, and never thought I would want to work for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company,” Kare said Tuesday at the Esc Keys launch event.

After studying art history and studio art, Kare was working at a retail store when a high school friend who worked as a programmer at Apple approached her about “a secret project he was working on,” she explained. “And one thing led to another, and I ended up getting a job creating the graphics and icons for the Macintosh.”

In addition to creating famous icons such as the “Happy Mac” that greeted users when the Macintosh booted up, Kare was responsible for Apple’s famous Chicago font and the cards for Microsoft Windows Solitaire. She later worked as Creative Director at Steve Jobs’ NeXT and Pinterest.

Kare’s Esc Keys collection draws on the pixel art style of her design work for Macintosh, with designs such as an alien face, a turtle and a playful “panic!” knob.

They are all engraved on precious metal keyboard keys, which you can wear as a necklace pendant, mount on the wall or plug into a real mechanical keyboard. In addition to the physical objects, the artworks are also available in digital form, as NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals.

“On the keys they remind you of things you should be doing instead of sitting at the keyboard,” Kare said Declutter. “The idea of ​​this fantastic level of craftsmanship really appealed to me, because I’m interested in objects off-screen, but also being able to have them made myself,” she explained, adding that “it’s just so hard” to give the block-shaped pixels accurately represent a physical object.

Kare added that one of the challenges of the design process was taking concepts and representing them as abstract icons, explaining, “It’s kind of 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 hash sign and the at sign. They’re definitely symbols, not illustrations,” she explained. When creating the new Esc Key icons, she said, “I thought they would seem more authentic and make more sense if you could see just a few things at a glance.”

Susan Kare and Alastair Walker, Chief Creative Officer of Asprey Studio. Image: decrypt

“Some things were much easier than others,” she said. “We wanted ‘kindness’ or ‘caring,’ and even when I Googled it, everything was just a heart, or hands, or hands holding a heart, or hands forming a heart.” Instead, Kare opted for a design with a watering can and a sapling. “That seemed like a caring or generous thing that wasn’t too sappy or cliché,” she explained.

This isn’t Kare’s first NFT artwork; she previously created “White Rose,” a pixel artwork in 1,000 editions, the proceeds of which were donated to the organization Stop AAPI Hate.

Asprey Studio, meanwhile, is “highly Web3-embedded,” Chief Creative Officer Alastair Walker said Declutter. “We have a membership 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,” says Walker.

For her part, Kare plans to continue working in the pixel art style that is indelibly associated with her. “I like pixels, you know,” she said. “And I still love the idea of ​​what you can create with black and white and 32×32. Give me 16×16 and a concept and we will come up with something.”

Esc Keys is at Asprey Studio until October 16th.

Edited by Andrew Hayward