Support for Alternative Layouts
This is a summary of how alternative layouts have been supported by kits such as Colevrak and Homing. It is not a discussion of alt layout performance and development, but if that interests you I highly recommend starting with Pascal Getreuer’s A guide to alt keyboard layouts (why, how, which one?). It’s a concise and comprehensive overview with links to some great sites that go deeper. He also has a separate Links about keyboards page. The Keyboard layouts doc he recommends explains layout goals and metrics in detail, summarizing the alt layouts discussed here as well as more than one hundred others. Sculpted-profile The majority of custom keycap sets are sculpted-profile (Cherry, SA, MT3, KAT, etc. - more on profiles generally here) so let’s start there. Because each row has a unique keycap shape, alt layouts require a unique keycap for each legend that moves off its QWERTY row. At first there were two The Dvorak layout was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak & William L....
Apr 23, 2024
Alot of mine came out damaged for BOTH sets.
Furthermore, maybe you didn't fully comprehended the actual background and concept that sustained the execution for this project?
https://mitormk.com/2017/12/22/lets-make-things-clear/
The keycaps are supposed to mimic the appearance of cyberpunk sentient beings!
With a flawless shell and a messed up internal structure.
The R4 sunset, and R3 A, S, D, and Enter all look acceptable though. Much cleaner, although still to your "gritty cyberpunk" interior doubleshot. But that makes sense when shoving molten plastic at high pressure through another plastic part. If the whole kit turned out this way, you wouldn't have as much of a complaint. You then provided an FAQ during delivery, which is too late to provide a "let me explain" at the resulted keycaps. If that information was known (mainly the smearing of the R2 W key) you wouldn't get as much backlash and probably would have a lot of people not get in on the drop. From the looks if it, you guys just did an R1 test and didn't actually test all the rows and are now playing it off as "we meant for it to look like this". I'm sorry, this isn't a Bob Ross "Happy little mistake" by any means, as you cannot go back over it with paint to fix it.
However, then there's the issue of the "Dusk" color from the photographed prototypes to delivered product. I don't know how that got switched around but the changes made were for the worse. It doesn't seem like this was part of the discussion on your colorway selection trip to Germany either, because these were shipped well in advance of the full Cyberdeck caps as well. It's also not a "it's how it is photographed" as I have yet to see anyone actually reproduce that same dark purple.
Maybe you posted a clarification on your website and buried in the comments, but that wasn't communicated on the drop page at all in the overview. You can't expect the people making a purchase through Massdrop to follow you through all your social media accounts and personal website or dig through hundreds of comments to get updates/clarifications on the product. Just let it be a lesson learned and apply that towards future drops when you're trying to be experimental. Put clarification notices on the main overview page and give an email update to those who have already committed to the drop of the update.
All I can do is make information clearer next time, and that’s what I plan to do moving forward.