I just fell in love with Susan Kare’s new icons

Susan Kare, designer of the original Apple icons, is back with a new 32-icon collection, one that you can buy in the form of silver or gold vermeil mechanical keys and pendants. Called Esc Keys, the new icons perfectly capture the everlasting magic of her 1-bit legendary past work, always mesmerizing in their extreme minimalism and at the same time as satisfying as triple-chocolate cake.

Kare obviously had lots of fun creating them. Her new designs—from an alien head to a light bulb to love birds to puppies, plus a ‘Panic!’ key that we all really need right now—inspire the same joy she was gleaming with when I spoke to her from New York—where she was visiting for the Esc Keys’ U.S. launch (and to celebrate her participation in the group exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design at MoMA).

We spoke about this collection’s genesis and about the attraction and everlasting power of pixel art as a universal language. A code that has seemingly crossed generations, beyond the people who originally experienced it first hand, when her original digital creations saw the world for the first time in 1984, when Steve Jobs presented the Macintosh in San Francisco, California. “I sent the first photos of the Alien icon pendant to my own three sons and I remember they all immediately wrote back: ‘Sick!’” she says. “I took that as a good sign.”

“There’s hidden meaning on each one”

Kare tells me that she was asked to create the collection by Alastair Walker, the founder and creative director of Asprey Studio—the Mayfair, London, art gallery that sprang up about two years ago from Asprey, a designer, manufacturer and retailer of jewelry, silverware, and all things luxury founded in London in 1781 (“The former Queen always bought gifts there!” Kare tells me with her charming laughter).

Walker says he thought Kare was the perfect person to design his idea of the “escape keys”: Meaningful symbols that would represent things people might want to do away from their keyboards, physical reminders of the joys of physical life. “There’s hidden meaning on each one,” Walker says, “and the whole idea is that they’re literally in front of you on the keyboard or on your chest. It’s a reminder not to be a keyboard warrior. So it’s kind of almost antithetical itself.”

“It’s a little ironic, but it resonated with me and I loved the idea,” Kare says. Walker initially asked if she would be interested in designing roughly 10 icons that would be on keyboard keys or mechanical keyboards with universal attachments. The 10 designs quickly grew to a collection of 60 to 70 concepts.

“She started doing some icons and then she showed me like a whole bunch of them,” Walker says. “And then we were like, ‘Oh, well, we can’t get rid of this one, you know. Or this one.’ So then we thought, you know what, just do them all.” He was fascinated by the process himself, he tells me. “She’s insanely methodical. You speak to her and she’s moving a pixel here and then she’s like, no, let’s move it there.” 

Stop, observe, reflect

The escape keys were a good metaphor of that process too, the idea to stop, observe, reflect, to slow life. There are so many options now, we get sucked into a vortex of choice that make things lose their true meaning and intention. And there’s so much meaning and intention in Kare’s designs.

“It’s just so funny when there’s 50 layers of undo now. You forget how amazing it was just to iterate undo and back again”, Kare tells me. “Andy Hertzfeld [one of the core Apple employees who made the Macintosh] wrote an icon editor as soon as I got to Apple. I did some drawings on graph paper to take to my job interviews, but using that icon editor was amazing. It was so nice to get to do it on the machine.”

In the end, Kare and Walker managed to curate the Esc Keys down to 32 final pieces, although additional icons will appear later for some charity events they have planned later in the year, Walker says.

Each icon is a limited edition, from 30 to 120 pieces depending on the icon, with prices ranging from $650 to $2,000 depending on the type of object: You can buy the computer key in enameled silver for $650 or in gold vermeil (a 19th-century technique in which you apply a thicker layer of gold to sterling silver, resulting in a finish that is five-times thicker and more durable than gold plating) for $1,010. The necklace pendant in silver goes for $1,390 while the gold vermeil version is $2,020.

“We carefully handcraft everything in the studio,” Walker says. “Things like the enameling is super sharp. You usually get blotches with enamel, but this is beautifully flushed, hand filed to get these sharp edges on the pixels.” Each icon is also paired with a digital counterpart on the blockchain.

She’s an icon

But more than their material value, these icons carry something that to me is far more precious: Kare’s unique ability to distill complex ideas into minimal, universal symbols that speak directly to our emotions. There’s something intrinsically appealing about the minimalist expression of Kare’s 1-bit icons, a striking contrast to this age of high-definition graphics, photorealistic interfaces, and artificial intelligence.

Her iconic imagery, which created the modern graphical computing language after it’s protoform was developed at Xerox PARC, is the progenitor of much graphic language we still see today. Her work has an endearing quality that made it ideal for the collection, Walker says. “It celebrates Susan. I’ve been looking at digital arts history in general and she’s the pioneer.” Indeed, Kare is the GOAT and everyone should say that more often. She should be recognized universally for her founding contribution to the modern era of both computing and design, and not just in those industries.

What Kare does may look simple, but the way she distills and synthesizes reality into its purest form, the pure soul of everyday things and ideas in a 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 grid, is nothing but pure art. The pixel aesthetic she pioneered has transcended its technological origins to become something deeply emotional and universally understood, which is the key to these keys.

Some may say that this is just nostalgia speaking, but it goes way beyond being a GenXer reminiscing about the golden years of computing and the Pirates of Silicon Valley. And it goes beyond the ‘faux nostalgia’ of the generations that grew up on touchscreens too. I suspect they crave these essential pixelated representations of reality, plastering their Tik Toks and playing retro games, not because they are artifacts of the past but because there is an intrinsic appeal in Kare’s work. Because the simplicity of things, the abstraction process, makes all of us put more of ourselves into those graphics. And that’s why I believe pixel art transcends generations and is universal.

The beauty of simple forms

There’s science to back this up. Shaped by millions of years of life evolution, our brains love to fill in the blanks. And, in that process, we project our emotions into these visual objects, something that is extremely satisfying at a subconscious level. It’s like the original Lego minifig, where there was only one smile and two eyes. It didn’t matter it was smiling: I remember putting my emotions in those ‘blank’ faces. A minigif could be happy or it could be sad. It could be angry or in love because of the simplicity of it. It makes us put our brain and soul into it. It creates a connection.

At this point in our conversation, Kate reminded me of American cartoonist Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. “He has a couple illustrations where he showed a few drawings, like a very detailed pen sketch of a person, and then less and less detail, getting down to just a circle with a slight smile and two eyes,” she says. McCloud’s said that, the less detail, the more universal and the more anybody can look at that and feel as if it represents them.

“I always used to think that the pencil icon can look to anybody like a writing implement. If you draw a chrome pen with highlight and shininess, it becomes so specific that it’s not the writing implement you imagine”, she says. “Even though most people don’t work in 72 DPI anymore or monochrome, I hope in some of these escape keys there’s that beauty,” Kare says. 

Indeed, that’s exactly the beauty of all her work. A beauty that is endearing and, well, cute. “I’ve been accused of being someone who likes things that are cute,” she says. “And yes, I really do think that a tablespoon of cute is good.” But cute may be interpreted as something done on purpose, frivolous and superficial. There’s nothing superficial about her approach to synthesis, however. The cute factor is a side effect of that process and the process of our brain projecting our ideas and feelings into simple forms, which makes them instantly endearing and memorable.

The objects in Esc Keys are a convergence of art, technology, and fine craftsmanship but, more importantly, they demonstrate in a physical and most definitive way how Kare’s visual language, born in the constraints of early computer displays, has evolved into something timeless. These aren’t just escape keys. They are escape pods into humanity’s core, in a time where so many people feel divorced from it.