SA Dasher & SA Dancer keycap sets (Completed)

[zslane]

I am just looking for the best possible source of RGB values for my 3D renders. At the moment I am using the RGB values from the ABS color swatch available on the www.keyboard-layout-editor.com web applet. I have no idea how those RGB values were derived. I just thought that sampling colors from scans (not photos) of the chips might be better.

For instance, the values for NN don't look dark enough to me. I'd like to compare the values from www.keyboard-layout-editor.com with a good high-res scan of the NN color chip. In fact, I'd like to do that comparison for all the chips.

[Muirium]

If the scans are all from one source — one scanner! — then sure, they'll give you a good basis for your renders. That's an ideal use.

I'm just always wary of the silly buggers who think you can measure the exact colour of anything in any picture ever taken, simply using the dropper tool in Photoshop…

[Crossfire]

Go on, take my money now!
I take both!

[slwb]

Registered for an account over here specifically to let you know I would buy the shit out of this keyset. 98% sure I would get both color schemes.

[zslane]

SA Dasher NUMPAD Kit:

SA Dasher NUMPAD Kit

dasher_numpad_ansi_01a.jpg (147.69 KiB) Viewed 4794 times

I did not include a 1u + or 1u - key because I don't understand what those are for. If they are important, I will add them to the kit.

[niomosy]

https://www.flickr.com/photos/compactke ... 628432952/

There's the link to the scans I was referring to. Not sure on the details of them though as I just found them while looking for some color info.

[zslane]

Awesome! Thanks!

[Elrick]

Every time I see this colour way, I get a good feeling from the good old days .

Best of any Blue Key-set so far released, hope it goes soon through SP's molds.

[zslane]

I hear ya, Elrick. I think there is a shameful paucity of sets with blue alphas available. This set ought to remedy that quite nicely.

I am also playing around with a Batgirl-themed colorway featuring dark blue alphas and yellow modifiers. I guess I have a "thing" for blue alphas...

[niomosy]

Blue is a fantastic color. I've got a few I'm playing with that have lots of blue and one that just uses only various blue colors. Fun stuff.

[Elrick]

I am also playing around with a Batgirl-themed colorway featuring dark blue alphas and yellow modifiers. I guess I have a "thing" for blue alphas...

Mmmmm Batgirl, sounds intriguing .

Looking forward to seeing that as well. Like it when someone starts furnishing our eyeballs with NEW colour-ways.

[zslane]

SA Dasher ISO Kit:

SA Dasher ISO Kit

dasher_iso_kit_01a.jpg (119.79 KiB) Viewed 4671 times

[zslane]

I was thinking of having an ARROWS kit:

SA Dasher ARROWS Kit

dasher_arrows_kit_01a.jpg (134.38 KiB) Viewed 4670 times

[Muirium]

Tasty. I especially like the diffuse shadows cast on the background.

If I were buying these — there's a chance I will though I really shouldn't — I'd want an additional logical kit containing only ISO Return, row 3 backslash, and 1.25u SHIFT. That's because I use my ISO keyboards in a very ANSI-like style, like this:



Note that such a kit is simply a subset of the existing ISO kit, so it wouldn't need any extra caps designed and produced. Rather, it's a way to spare me and some others the need to buy a bunch of ISO UK caps we don't use. ISO kits tend to be super expensive, mostly because of the double decked Return key. So you want as many people to buy that cap as possible to get the price down.

And yes, I don't really even know what to do with that extra ISO key, right of left Shift. In Round 5, I use the German <> cap, but I already have , and . for those. It's a minor problem, anyway. As I'm on true ANSI more often in truth.


Edit: Oh wait, you'd don't have row 3 backslash. Bugger. That's the key just left of ISO Return for me. I do like the double colour options you have for it in row 4 and also the row 1 UK oddball bent pipe key that absolutely no one ever uses, but I retain backtick / tilde up there for sanity! I use that key quite a lot, on ANSI and ISO.

[zslane]

I think that folks with non-standard layouts must simply accept an uncomfortable fact of life: they will usually be buying kits with keycaps they don't need in order to get the ones they do.

My general philosophy is that it is better to make keycaps available as part of fewer, larger kits than not available at all, which would be the only alternative since I don't want to go the 7bit route and define a gajillion ala carte kits. I want to keep the kit count to somewhere down around four or five kits. If that means the set never hits MOQ on any of the kits, then so be it. There's always Facetsame's project; maybe the odd layout crowd will have better luck there. But it has been pointed out up thread that a number of other very successful sets have had limited kit offerings (as well as no custom or novelty legends), so I remain optimistic.

My thoughts regarding ISO in particular are largely shaped by your insight on the matter, Muirium. ISO users represent such a tiny percentage of buyers to begin with that I'm making a correspondingly minimal effort to customize kits for them. ISO users who want this will buy the ISO kit and sell off or trade the keycaps they don't need, or they'll decline to buy in at all. The impact on the total head count either way will be relatively miniscule, so I'm not going to be too concerned about it. If I was going to add keycaps to the ISO kit, I'd rather add a couple of keys for French and/or German users than add keys for layouts only one or two people use.

As it stands, the ISO kit already has a Muirium-specific keycap, and the Arrows kit might as well be subtitled "Brought to You by Muirium the Crazy Scotsman". After all, I wouldn't want you to feel completely ignored.

[Muirium]

The pupil learns quickly!

You're quite right about ISO. My heart isn't in it (hence my ISO-US) and I'd ignore it completely if I weren't in a region knee deep in ISO hardware. I'll gladly take ANSI by itself. Along with the appropriate arrow set. However people live with a flat SA arrow cluster I don't know. Blech.

[niomosy]

One thing I'm noticing with MD right now is the Otaku set. While not trying to sound mean, that one seems to be a bit of a mess at the moment, at least from reading all the discussion on the MD discussion. Hopefully we can steer clear of the problems that buy is facing at the moment; discounts shown on a Google Docs spreadsheet, kit confusion among some potential buyers.

[Muirium]

While not trying to not sound mean, I'd say that's half the fault of the kit designers and half the fault of the morons who like to discuss things on MD instead of a real forum!

Wherever there are kits (or any kind of choice), there will be questions. And many of them will be dumb. Just human nature.

What makes 7bit's threads so amusing is that he adds unnecessary complexity he could fix with a webstore instead of his madcap "bot" ordering obfuscation process, and then lets his customers offer each other support because he sure ain't doing it. Genius! Tiresome, downright cruel to newbs, and surely losing him more than a few orders. But there is a certain wonder to it…

[niomosy]

Yeah, 7-bit's ordering process is certainly odd. It's definitely something that's kept me away from Round 5a. Well, that and the suspected arrival times for keycaps (guessing 2017 at this rate for 5a).

I do agree that it's a combined effort creating the problems with the Otaku set. The base set is too small, the needed 60% kit seems priced high, and Massdrop didn't put the discount information up on the site. Sadly, given that, it's not too surprising that there's a combination of confusion and frustration in the MD discussion. They're up to 44 purchased. It seems like it would have been higher with better pricing information to get people to at least commit at the lowest price. The way MD has pricing set up right now, it gets people initially interested based on the $50.99 price, then quickly turned off once they determine the sets they need and the math is done.

[zslane]

I expect the most discussion to surround the last kit I (currently) plan to define: the Specialty Kit, which will contain all the keycaps for unusual layouts and such. And I'd like to hash all that out here rather than on GH or reddit or the group buy site, whichever one we go with. I feel that once a set goes up for (pre-)orders, the time for influencing the composition of kits has passed. I kind of feel that MassDrop is conditioning members to think it is okay to ask for changes to the kits during the GB Join period, which is too late IMO.

[Muirium]

Absolutely.

Altering things after people have already bought them is dodgy and plain stupid. Even with a big obfuscatory asterisk about when exactly people get charged for their commitment. Selling things the old fashioned way – when they're finished! – is much more honest.

Have you got a handle on how expensive these various kits will be to manufacture? There's a balancing act between adding more stuff to attract more orders vs. leaving stuff out to reduce the price and attract more orders. Get it wrong, and you'll have a minimal number of extraordinarily expensive caps, at best, or just no GB happen at all.

[zslane]

No, I haven't even begun to think about that. The TKLBASE, NUMPAD, ISO, and ARROWS kits are all conventional and/or small enough that I don't expect them to be particularly cost sensitive. Its the SPECIALTY kit that is going to require the most scrutiny. I'm going to start with a variant of the Hack'd by Geeks set and go from there. I'm hoping that some of the more experienced community members will offer guidance along the way.

Part of the problem, for me, is that I don't really know what most of the keycaps in that set are for since I only use standard ANSI layouts. Therefore it is difficult for me to apply any personal judgment to its composition.

[Muirium]

And that's where every man and his dog start giving their opinions!

Beyond the basic ANSI Filco compatible stuff, people tend to diverge quite a bit. We all have our pet projects in mind. That's tricky terrain. I'd err on the side of too much focus on the basics, if I were you. Even and especially if it means turning my own peculiar requests down! I'm just as guilty as the rest of them.

ISO may be standard, but SP charges quite a bit for that oddball Return key. And that's just the start of it. Because ISO doesn't serve just one primary language, like ANSI does. Instead, we ISO users are pretty evenly split between German QWERTZ, British QWERTY, French AZERTY, and the Nordic layouts, just to name a few. Each one has its own differences that need extra keys. Have you seen how much work it was for Matteo in Granite?




The volumes on these are always a lot lower than the basic ANSI stuff. Again from Matteo's original Granite thread:



(He posted several updates like that. Those aren't the final numbers, but the ratios will be about right.)

So, ISO is a pain for GB organisers. Some of us will be satisfied with a basic ISO-UK like kit, as you've already designed. But not most. And it'll cost. Urgh…

[Hypersphere]

This is looking better and better each day!

I would be tempted to get the num pad kit, just for that double zero key.

If this has not already been mentioned, I would make a plea for color options for the backslash and backtick/tilde keys for color symmetry. I am one of those who likes having these keys the same color as the modifiers.

In addition, I like the arrow keys to be the same color as the alpha keys -- it looks like you have already provided for this.

[Muirium]

See, I'm not the only one!

[zslane]

Oh, I am very aware of the Granite international kits. I have no desire to produce such massive kits. I'm inspired by the UK-only ISO kits I've seen offered with other successful sets, and am hoping to get by with that. I don't know if adding a keycap or two would help another country feel included, but I don't want it to double in size just to draw an additional 10% to the buy-in.

@Hypersphere: I'm pretty sure my TKLBASE kit offers reverse colored keycaps for ESC, ~` and |\. A quick look back at page 4 confirms this.

[niomosy]

The balancing act of sets is always an interesting situation. TKL as a base is fantastic for someone like me with a full size keyboard. Since the plan was to avoid pushing this into a group buy until next year, it seems like there's a fair amount of time for people to start hashing out kit desires and such, though those discussions can sometimes get lengthy.

[zslane]

Was Hack'd by Geeks offered in multiple kits, or just the one Deluxe kit containing all the keys?

[niomosy]

Was Hack'd by Geeks offered in multiple kits, or just the one Deluxe kit containing all the keys?

Checking.... and....

Full set, no kits. To quote the original post:

No kits, no muss, no fuss. Alphas, Mods, Numpad, Tsangan, ISO, and JD40/45 all included. One kit to rule them all.

[zslane]

How successful was Hack'd by Geeks? Asking buyers (especially ANSI users) to pay for so many keys they'll never use is a pretty ballsy move.