In the 1980s, artist Susan Kare painted a human face on the Apple Macintosh, creating icons and fonts that revolutionized the way we interact with computers.
Now she’s bridging the digital and physical worlds again with a new art collection, Esc Keys, showcased at London’s Asprey Studio as part of Frieze London ahead of its launch at the end of November at Esprit studio website.
“I was a typical artist kid who loved to draw and do all kinds of crafts, and I never thought I would want to work for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company,” Kare said at the Esc Keys presentation.
Having studied art history and studio art, Kare was working in a store when a high school friend who worked as a programmer at Apple approached her with “a secret project he was working on,” she explained. “And one thing led to another, and I ended up getting a job creating graphics and icons for the Macintosh.”
In addition to creating famous icons such as the “Happy Mac” that greeted users when they booted up the Macintosh, Kare was responsible for the famous Apple Chicago font and cards for Microsoft Windows Solitaire. She later worked as a creative director at NeXT and Steve Jobs’ Pinterest.
Kare’s Esc Keys collection reflects the pixel art style of her Macintosh design work, including images of an alien face, a turtle, and a playful “panic!” button.
All of them are inscribed on keyboard keys made of precious metals, which can be worn as a pendant necklace, mounted on a wall, or inserted into an actual mechanical keyboard. In addition to physical objects, artworks are also available in digital form, as NFTs and Bitcoin serial numbers.
“On the keys, they remind you of what you should be doing instead of sitting at the keyboard,” Kare said. Decipher. “The idea of this fantastic level of craftsmanship really appealed to me because I’m kind of interested in working with objects behind the scenes but being able to create them,” she explained, adding that “it’s so challenging” to accurately map blocky pixels onto a physical object.
Kare added that one of the challenges of the design process was to take concepts and display them as abstract icons, explaining, “It’s kind of like a haiku.”
“A lot of them were just thinking about some of these concepts and maybe trying not to be too complicated,” she said. “You think about the things that are on the keyboard, like the pound sign and the at sign, that are definitely symbols and not illustrations,” she explained. When creating the new Esc key icons, she said, “I thought they would feel more authentic and make more sense if they were just some things that could be seen at a glance.”
“Some things were a lot easier than others,” she said. “We wanted ‘kindness’ or ‘caring,’ and even when we Googled it, it was just heart, or hands, or hands holding a heart, or hands making a heart.” Instead, Kare chose a design featuring a watering can and a sapling. “It seemed like a caring and generous thing to do, without being too laconic or cliché,” she explained.
This isn’t Kare’s first NFT work—she previously created “White Rose,” a 1,000-piece pixel art piece whose proceeds were donated to Stop AAPI Hate.
Meanwhile, Asprey Studio is “very much built into Web3,” said its chief creative officer Alastair Walker. Decipher. “We have a members club that uses NFT tokens and has just 180 members,” he said, adding that the studio is building a “state-of-the-art workshop” in Kent. “It’s all about building digital and physical collections,” Walker said.
For her part, Kare plans to continue working in the pixel art style that has become indelibly associated with her. “You know, I love pixels,” she said. “And I still love the idea of what you can do with black and white and 32×32. Give me a 16×16 and a concept, we’ll come up with something.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
