I have never had any interest in getting a hardware wallet like the new Ledger Nano Gen 5. But talking with Susan Kare—the designer of the original Apple Macintosh icons and an endless torrent wonderful pixel art—made me realize I need one. “The idea that an individual can really control their own assets without a government or anything political coming between you and your assets. I like that,” she tells me.
The Ledger Nano is a 0.3-inch-thick credit card-sized block that keeps your digital assets secure by storing them offline. It has a frontal e-ink display that displays a grid of pixel art icons that look very much like the original Mac. For the Nano Gen 5, Kare worked with the French company to design a set of nine pixel-art icons that are laser-engraved onto small aluminum tags. These tags physically snap into a dedicated slot on the Nano Gen 5, allowing owners to customize their device with a satisfying click.
Kare got involved thanks to Tony Fadell—”the Father of the Apple iPod” and board member of Ledger—who called her to see if she’d like to work on the project. It was a call between old friends; the two had worked together at General Magic, the secretive Silicon Valley startup founded in 1990 by Apple veterans Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Marc Porat that tried to build the first smartphone decades too early.
Fadell knows her taste, Kare says, and pitched the project as a high-concept design challenge she would enjoy, similar to the work she did for Asprey Studio. He kept the details intentionally mysterious, not even mentioning Ledger by name at first. The only hook was the promise of a fun, creative puzzle. For Kare, that was more than enough.
“Of course, I wrote back immediately, like, tell me more,” she recalls. A meeting in San Francisco with Ariel Wengroff, Ledger’s EVP of Communications and Marketing, sealed the deal, and soon Kare was back at her digital drawing board.
Power and fun
Kare’s collaboration comes as Ledger reinvents its flagship product. The new Ledger Nano Gen 5 is a significant evolution of the device used by eight million people in 165 countries. More than 20% of the world’s crypto assets are secured by its hardware wallets, the company tells me.
Physically, Ledge Nano Gen 5 is larger and more refined, with a 2.76-inch E Ink touchscreen that now dominates its face. The new energy-efficient display enables advanced security features like “clear signing,” which gives you an unambiguous on-screen verification of any transaction or approval, and a “Transaction Check” function, a security feature that simulates a transaction to identify potential threats before you give final approval.
The device, now officially called a “signer” to reflect its expanded role beyond just financial transactions, is built to be your key to a broader digital life. With Bluetooth 5.2 and NFC capabilities, it’s designed for on-the-go use, allowing you to securely manage your assets or verify your identity from anywhere.
It connects to the revamped Ledger Wallet app, which acts as a secure control center for buying, swapping, and earning assets, and can now connect directly to popular decentralized apps, like 1inch, a service that searches across multiple cryptocurrency exchanges to find the best possible price for a token swap. The company claims that its devices have never been hacked, but every Nano Gen 5 includes a Ledger Recovery Key as a physical backup, just in case.
While the technology is serious, the company claims it wanted to inject a dose of personality into the experience. That’s where Kare came in. Wengroff tells me that as our digital and physical lives blur, the team wanted to offer a form of personal expression. The idea was to create a series of collectible badges that would physically snap into the new Nano’s chassis.
“We really thought, actually, the perfect person would be Susan Kare,” Wengroff says. She believes that Kare’s has a “legendary ability to create an emotional connection” for new technology using her pixel art.
The badges themselves are small, laser-engraved aluminum tags, each featuring a new pixel-art icon from Kare, manufactured in Ledger’s own facility in Vierzon, France. They click into place with a satisfying snap, a small sensory experience.
For Kare, the project was a perfect fit. “I usually jokingly say, you know, give me 16 by 16 and a concept and I will make it happen,” she says. The first step was deciding on the actual grid resolution. To ensure the designs were bold and clear on the small tags, she and the Ledger team opted for fewer, but larger, pixels, with each icon fitting within roughly an 18 by 20 pixel grid.
Rather than being handed a specific list, the company just told Kare to do her thing. Any other thing would have been like asking David Bowie to write “something retro like Life on Mars” for you. She ultimately developed around 30 concepts for the team to choose from. Her goal was to create an assortment that felt fresh and spirited, steering clear of anything that felt like a standard emoji.
Through weekly Zoom calls with Ledger’s creative director, they whittled the collection down to the final nine, which include a mischievous cherry, a magic 8-ball, a horseshoe, and a chihuahua the team has fittingly named Nano.
But the best—and apparently everyone’s favorite—is the crowned frog. Wengroff believed it was a frog princess but Kare was thinking about the frog prince. “It’s funny because I thought it was a frog prince,” Kare says, referencing the fairy tale and the dating adage about having to “kiss a lot of frogs.” But, she adds, “it can totally be either. And I realized that that’s good.”
Wengroff notes that everyone in the office has interpreted the icons differently and picked their own favorites, proving the designs’ power to evoke a personal response. In fact, everyone in Wengroff’s team was so focused on the badges that she says she constantly had to remind everyone that the launch was for a new device, not for the badges. Which I guess is exactly the whole point of this article and also the device itself.
For Kare, this is the joy of her work. While the device itself is the point, it is “that little dab of something with a little feel of art or personality,” as Kare describes it, what makes it (clickity clack) click. It’s the same philosophy that has made her work timeless. And what makes the new Ledger Nano not just a powerful tool for securing your digital life, but a small canvas for expressing it.