geekhack
geekhack Community => Keyboard Keycaps => Topic started by: brizzology on Fri, 05 April 2019, 18:54:28
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Hi, I'm new to the forum, looking for some advice on keycap design.
I work for a tech company and have gotten some people onboard with financing a set of custom keycaps which might one day be sold or given away to the public, etc.
I thought we might start with a custom f-row and/or a few modifiers, in a cherry/GMK style that would fit with many mechanical keyboards. Down the road we could try building a full set to fit a variety of keyboards.
I got approval to put together a design. My company already has some very nice icons and logos in SVG and adobe illustrator format I could use. I've connected with signature plastics about the build. So now I 'simply' need to create an accurate representation of the keycap in illustrator, slap the logos on, and send it back to Signature Plastics.
My simple question: does anyone have an adobe illustrator template (or alternative) for common keycap profiles already setup to use for this kind of work?
I looked at http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/ but it was not obvious how I'd be able to add custom logos in, say, SVG format. Maybe this is the tool I should use but I'd love to know what others think.
I've seen tons of amazing designs come out of geekhack so I know there must be keycap designers that might have some friendly advice here. I'm sure I'm forgetting 10,000 other things :)
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(I am not a keycap designer. ;-)
If you want to do a 1-off proof of concept you can turn your AI or SVG file images into keycaps over at WASD:
http://www.wasdkeyboards.com/index.php/products/keycap-set/61-key-cherry-mx-keycap-set.html
They have templates you can edit.
The icons/images, whatever are printed onto keys.
good luck with the project, and welcome to geekhack!
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Thanks ErgoMacros! That link is super useful because they also provide template files for AI and inkscape, which I should be able to use to get started, no matter where I eventually take my design. Specifically I found the templates here: https://support.wasdkeyboards.com/hc/en-us/articles/115007847008-Download-Template-Files