Apple designer Susan Carey brings NFT ‘Esc Keys’ to Asper Studio.

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

Now she's re-entering the digital and physical worlds with a new art collection, Esc Keys, at London's Aspri Studio as part of Frieze London.

“I was just a typical artsy kid who loved painting and all kinds of crafts, and I never thought I'd want to work for a Fortune 500 manufacturing company,” Square said at the Esc Keys launch event on Tuesday.

After studying 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 about a “mystery project to work on.” “And one thing led to another, and I started making Macintosh graphics and icons.”

As well as creating iconic icons such as the “Happy Mac” that greeted users when a Macintosh booted up, Square was responsible for Apple's famous Chicago typewriter and Microsoft's Windows solitaire cards. She later went on to work as creative director at Steve Jobs' NeXT and Pinterest.

Kare's Esc Keys collection for Macintosh is based on her pixel art style, designs an alien face, a turtle, and a playful “Shock!” Button.

All are engraved on keyboard keys made of precious metals—they can be worn as necklaces, mounted on a wall, or inserted into an actual mechanical keyboard. Alongside physical objects, the artworks are available in digital form as NFTs and Bitcoin Ordinals.

“On the keys, they're reminders of things you need to do instead of being on the keyboard,” Square told Decrypt. “The idea of ​​this amazing level of craftsmanship really appealed to me, because I'm interested in off-screen, objects, but being able to make these,” she explains, “is very difficult.” is” render blocky pixels correctly on a physical object.

Kare added that one of the challenges of the design process was taking concepts and presenting them as abstract icons, “It's kind of like a haiku.”

“A lot of them were just thinking about some of these concepts, and maybe trying not to get too complicated,” she said. “You think about things like the pound sign and the symbols — they're definitely symbols, not metaphors,” she said. When she created the new Esc key icons, she said, “I thought some of the things you could see at a glance would look more authentic and make more sense.”

“Some things were easier than others,” she said. All we searched for was ‘kindness' or ‘care', and even Googling, everything was a heart, or a hand, or a hand holding a heart, or hands making a heart. Instead, he chose a design that shows a square water tank and a bud. “It seemed like something very thoughtful or generous, not so much a betrayal or a cliché,” she said.

This isn't Kare's first NFT artwork—she previously created “White Rose,” a 1,000-edition piece of pixel art, with proceeds donated to the Stop AAPI Hate organization.

Asprey Studio, meanwhile, is “very Web3-centric,” chief creative officer Alastair Walker told Decrypt. “We have a member's club, NFT is token-gated, with only 180 members,” he said, adding that he is building a studio in Kent “art workshop situation”. “It's all about creating digital and physical collections,” Walker said.

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

Esc Keys will be available at Aspri Studios until October 16th.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.