Hey GH, how's it going? So ever since Iris, my split handed ergo 50%, went through to production, I've been itching to get another project out into the community. I'd been wanting to produce an SA variant of my dark green and white keyset, Evergreen (
https://imgur.com/a/4KCcO) that ran through Signature Plastics in 2015. There's a Massdrop poll that's just been vegetating for a while, that I've all but given up hope on, so I went around looking for a way to contact the elusive Maxkeys. I was directed to zFrontier as being the people to talk to, as I don't speak any languages beside English and highschool-level Japanese.
This is where you come in, besides the whole "hey guys you get new sets" news.
Maxkeys are theoretically able to color match to any Pantone color. Obviously zfrontier request a sample of a given color to verify this is possible, but there doesn't seem to be any issues with that so far.
The past few days I've been digging through the Pantone site, and I've uncovered three colors that are all rather similar but different enough to each make a spot in the poll.
The original design idea for Evergreen was to make a mossy, not intensely green-grey, not quite regular green sort of design to match the semi-muted forest shades I found appealing, however I realize this may not be to everybody's taste, hence I've created a poll to get the community's thoughts, with the vastly scientific Goldilocks method. Either it's gotta be greyer, or it's good enough as is, or it needs to be greener. (
https://imgur.com/a/PsMRD)
Have a vote here for the color you'd prefer.
https://strawpoll.com/3gkxs7a3 This is going to be both the main color for the modifiers and the text color for the alphas, the other color of which is to be Pantone 11-0105
https://www.pantone.com/color-finder/11-0105-TPX aka Antique White, as it fits right between being white enough to work decently with all of them, but cream/off-white enough to have some soul to it, much like vintage SA sets that are found every now and again.
I'm going to see if I can find a sweet spot of additional keys to support a range of layouts, but not to the point where the average user is buying far more keys and paying more than they'd need to.
Ergodox support, 40% support, ortho/planck/orthodox/Iris etc support are planned for now, but given the sculpted nature of the set (currently thinking 1-1-2-3-4-4 for the profile), this may change. If you can think of any other kits that can be reasonably incorporated, I'll see if I can come up with a layout that works for everyone as best I can.
When the colours are sorted, I'll probably post some promotional material by way of renders by one of the many talented artists in the community (if you fit this description and want to help let me know). I'm mainly a /r/mechanicalkeyboards user, but I'm posting here and DT too, any and all pitchforks may be directed to my DMs, but my intention's just to let enough people with keebs have some nice caps.
As far as novelties go, I'm definitely reinstating the kanji character for tree, and if anyone's got any ideas for anything else that can be done, I'd be glad to expand to one or two more little logos etc.
Hope everyone's having a great day
also, mockup render colors are subject to change (obviously), I just threw it into kbrender.com to get a feel for it
