As keyboards have become a ubiquitous part of life, forever changing the way we work and communicate, Susan Kare has shaped that visual language. As a prolific graphic designer, she has designed the landscape of user interface design much more than can be quantitatively measured. Starting at Apple in 1983, she is the creator of many recognizable icons, including the Happy Mac, the bomb, and the floppy disk save icon, now synonymous with the action of saving, much like ‘Google’ is to ‘search’. Esc Keys from Asprey Studio features 32 of these icons in both gilded keycap and limited-edition jewelry form, bringing a love of pixelated nostalgia to the board and body.
Designer of the Geneva, Monaco, Chicago, and New York typefaces, she has had a hand in most computing interfaces and fonts we can recognize today. “Susan is an influential and pioneering artist who works with reduced palettes and resolutions to convey, in an immediately understandable way, complex and often inexpressible tasks,” shares Alastair Walker, Chief Creative Officer of Asprey Studio.
Available as pendants or keycaps, all rendered in either silver or gold vermeil, each icon recalls a different era of computing, one seemingly of expansiveness and possibility. As tech companies steadily monopolize more and more aspects of daily life, we wonder, could we establish a new wave of nostalgic technology, and foster a more sustainable relationship to consumption with smaller and more intentional collections?
There is hidden meaning to each of the designs in the collection, bitmaps telling a story of different interests people might like beyond the keyboard. Both a celebration of precious metals and a nod to computing history, the 32 keycap options heighten an otherwise utilitarian object into something one of a kind.
Asprey Studio is a digital and contemporary art gallery, focusing on the dialogue between our lives off and online. A new venture for Asprey London, who has set a standard of excellence for over 200 years, Asprey Studio focuses on a zero waste process with made to order products, dramatically reducing excess throughout several steps of the process. This way they can offer a premium product in every sense, produced thoughtfully and made to last, much like the icons that dot the Esc Keys collection.
Susan Kare
To learn more about the Esc Keys collection, visit aspreystudio.com.
Photography and graphics courtesy of Susan Kare and Asprey Studio.