The new Ledger hardware wallet now comes with enviable Susan Kare icons
By Jesus Diaz | Published: 2025-10-27 15:30:00 | Source: Fast Company – co-design
I had absolutely no interest in getting a hardware wallet like that The new Ledger Nano Gen 5. But talking with Susan Kerr—the designer of the original Apple Macintosh icons and endlessly gorgeous pixel art—made me realize I needed one. “The idea that an individual can really control their own assets without a government or anything political between you and your assets. I love that,” she told me.
The Ledger Nano is a 0.3-inch-thick credit card-sized block that keeps your digital assets safe by storing them offline. It has a front E-Ink screen that displays a grid of pixel art icons 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 laser-etched onto small aluminum cards. These tags actually clip into a dedicated slot in the Nano Gen 5, allowing owners to customize their device with a satisfying click.
Carey got involved thanks to Tony Fadell — the father of the Apple iPod and a member of Ledger’s board of directors — who contacted 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, a secretive Silicon Valley startup founded in 1990 by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Mark Porat, who attempted to build the first smartphone decades prematurely.
Carey says Fadel knows her taste, and she pitched the project as a high-concept design challenge she would enjoy, similar to the work she did at Asprey Studio. He deliberately kept the details vague, and did not mention Ledger by name at first. The only hook was the promise of a fun and creative puzzle. For Carrie, that was more than enough.
“Of course, I immediately responded, ‘Tell me more,'” she recalls. The deal was sealed in a meeting in San Francisco with Ariel Wingrove, Ledger’s executive vice president of communications and marketing, and Carey was soon back to her digital drawing board.
Power and fun
The Kare collaboration comes as Ledger reinvents its flagship product. The new Ledger Nano Gen 5 is a major evolution for the device used by eight million people in 165 countries. The company told me that more than 20% of the world’s cryptocurrency assets are secured by its hardware wallets.
Physically, the Ledge Nano Gen 5 is larger and more refined, with a 2.76-inch e-ink touchscreen now dominating its face. The new energy-efficient display enables advanced security features such as Clear Signature, which gives you unambiguous on-screen verification of any transaction or approval, and Transaction Verification, a security feature that simulates a transaction to identify potential threats before final approval is given.
The device, now officially called a “signer” to reflect its expanded role beyond just financial transactions, is designed 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 applications, such as 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 device includes a Ledger recovery key as an actual backup, just in case.
While the technology is serious, the company claims it wanted to inject a dose of personality into the experience. And here came Carrie’s turn. With the blurring of our digital and physical lives, the team wanted to offer a form of personal expression, Wingrove told me. The idea was to create a series of collectible decals that could be physically mounted to the new Nano’s chassis.
“We really thought the perfect person would be Susan Curry,” Wingrove says. She believes Kare has a “legendary ability to create an emotional connection” to new technology with her pixel art.
The badges themselves are small laser-etched aluminum tags, each featuring Kare’s new pixel art symbol, manufactured at Ledger’s own facility in Vierzon, France. They settle into place with a satisfying snap, a little sensory experience.
For Carey, the project was a perfect fit. “I usually jokingly say, ‘Give me a 16 x 16 and a concept and I’ll make it happen,'” she says. The first step was to decide on the actual mesh resolution. To ensure that the designs were bold and clear on small signs, she and the Ledger team chose fewer but larger pixels, fitting each icon within a roughly 18-by-20-pixel grid.
Instead of handing over a set list, the company told Kare to do whatever she wanted. Anything else would be like Ask David Bowie to write “Something as Old as Life on Mars” for you.. I eventually developed about 30 concepts for the team to choose from. Her goal was to create a variety that felt fresh and vibrant, moving away from anything that looked like a standard emoji.
Through weekly Zoom calls with Ledger’s creative director, they narrowed the collection down to a final nine, which includes a mischievous Cherry, a Magic 8-Ball, a Horseshoe, and a Chihuahua that the team appropriately named Nano.
But the best – and everyone’s favorite, it seems – is the crested toad. Wingrove thought it was a frog princess but Carrie was thinking of the frog prince. “It’s funny because I thought he was the Frog Prince,” Carrie says, referring to the fairy tale and dating adage about having to “kiss a lot of frogs.” But, she adds, “it could totally be the case.” And I realized that this is a good thing
Wingrove points out that everyone in the office interpreted the icons differently and chose their favorites, proving the designs’ ability to elicit a personal response. In fact, everyone on Wingrove’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 the badges. Which I think is exactly the point of this article as well as the device itself.
For Carrie, that’s the joy of her job. While the device itself is the point, it’s “that little touch of something with a little art or personality,” as Carey describes it, that makes it click (click click). It’s the same philosophy that has made her work timeless. What makes the new Ledger Nano not just a powerful tool for securing your digital life, but a small canvas to express it.
The early deadline for Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards is Friday, November 14, at 11:59 PM PT. Apply today.
(tags for translation) Product Design
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
