IC/Discussion on beige set

[zulios]

Hope you will offer 2 units 2 stems keys for tipro / POS keyboards. I am soooo interested

[Muirium]

That would be ambitious. As would 3 or 4 unit Tipro space bars!

[matt3o]

I'll try to offer all the keys that are available in DSA PBT, this is THE ONE set. PBT dyesub. It will last forever and I want it to fit every crazy layout I may come up with. But of course it won't be 7bit crazy ("crazy", in a good way).

[Muirium]

Mac mods (Command and Option) please, along with Super, Hyper and Meta and whatever you like!

[matt3o]

Option and "place of interest" (google it) are definitely part of the deal as well as as many languages as possible.

[Muirium]

Swedish campground! ⌘
And a fork in the road. ⌥

[pasph]

WANT!

[scottc]

Hmm, sounds nice. I may be interested!

[Broadmonkey]

What font was decided? If we ended up deciding one, that is.

[Muirium]

And, like that, the font wars begun all over again…

I'd be happy with any of these:




http://typesetinthefuture.com/2001-a-space-odyssey/

Come to think of it, where the hell is the COMPUTER MALFUNCTION light on this thing?

[matt3o]

GUYS!

Quoting SP

there will not be one-time set up fees

regarding fonts. Please start the war all over again, we have to make a decision!

I like Gotham (or even Gotham rounded) quite a bit, but I don't know how it will look on a keyboard. Din is also pretty nice. It looks similar to the 3rd picture Muir sent here above.

Again if we find a nice open font would be better... but heck... who cares!

[Vierax]

Some combos.

This is close to Model M:



Very similar but "pure" gray



A bit darker



And this is close to topre hi-pro



Other ideas?

Did you finally choose one of them ?

[tjweir]

Another font family for consideration - Fira Mono.

http://mozilla.github.io/Fira/

[matt3o]

Did you finally choose one of them ?

so far this is the best imho



but I'll review the color ring once again.

[Muirium]

I like the clean look of those light greys. The mellow GSG/GCH pair is appealing, but only because so much of the good old stuff is yellowed over the years! We're better going sharp, I think.

Fonts are the bit I care about the most. We can have proper kerning and everything!

[jdeblese]

Yikes, there are 6000 sans serif fonts on MyFonts. Way too many to chose from, and no idea how they'll look on a keyboard.

What's the software you guys use to generate those previews of color schemes? Does that support loading different fonts? Then we could generate a few examples with fonts people already have.

[Muirium]

Anyone got some calibrated RGB values for those PBT colours? I can do font previews once I have them.

[matt3o]

believe it or not... this is calibrated. but it simply doesn't work since plastic is not flat

[Muirium]

Hopefully those USELESS and DUMB caps are in this GB…

FONTS!

So Sci-Fi, in a classic New Hollywood late 60s-70s way.

Eurostile.png (126.76 KiB) Viewed 4619 times

Stanley F*king Kubrick.

Futura.png (117.06 KiB) Viewed 4619 times

Futura's greatest rival.

Univers.png (161.24 KiB) Viewed 4619 times

The British Empire Strikes Back.

Gill Sans.png (112.82 KiB) Viewed 4617 times

And my favourite as ever, so perfect that you can't see any flaws, just sublime Helvetica.

Helvetica Neue.png (145.47 KiB) Viewed 4619 times

And for reference: the one Apple uses on all its keyboards these days. Aka: The Volkswagen font.

VAG Rounded.png (122.84 KiB) Viewed 4619 times

I have all of these in several weights, as I know you like your dyesub legends not to be too wispy. They look different on plastic than on screen.

[matt3o]

Of all you listed the one I prefer is Helvetica. When I get two mins I'll try to make some mock ups. Especially with gotham and din.

In the meantime, more color combos

[jdeblese]

WAN + GSH gets my vote.

I also like Helvetica and maybe Gill, but not a big fan of the sci-fi ones. I've seen a few new fonts I like (Metro Nova andr Mir attached), but if we're going for broad appeal and the definitive set, we may be better off with a tried-and-true classic. Otherwise we'll never get everyone on board.

And to add fuel to the fire, caps or small letters on the keys?

[matt3o]

Metro Nova (with some standard alternate) is very nice actually... but that Q...

[Ichigo87]

Good news to hear that it's gonna start soon, i am really interested in. DSA is cool because you don't have to care about row but how high do you think that the moq will be for keys like numbers and special characters from Azerty for example ?

[matt3o]

it's hard to make an estimate since all keys are actually blank. So let's say we sell 50 lengended keys and 50 blanks, the tier met is actually 100. That is even more true for DSA where there are no rows (so all the keys are the same).

So I don't know exactly how the quote will be done. Anyway all languages will be printed together so I hope that won't be a big issue.

[shrapneL]

This is looking great matteo. I'd say let's use Helvetica, and I'm down for the popular vote on colors

[woody]

Is it possible to request renaming "PAGE UP" to "PGUP" and "PAGE DOWN" to "PGDN" to keep the style of "INS" and "DEL" ?
At last a kit that has sane colors.

[Muirium]

I like symbols instead of words:



But it's yet another matter of personal preference, of course.

[jdeblese]

I like symbols as well.

But if I understand Matt3o correctly, there's no MOQ on a particular legend as long as the keycap is the same, so if they don't charge extra fixed costs per legend then we could offer a choice, or both.

[matt3o]

I don't want company logos, apart from that I'm pretty open to any suggestion

[matt3o]

I like symbols as well.

But if I understand Matt3o correctly, there's no MOQ on a particular legend as long as the keycap is the same, so if they don't charge extra fixed costs per legend then we could offer a choice, or both.

there's no cost per legend but of course the more legends the more labor, so I'm not going to have 1 new legend per person