Keyreative Autumn and Spring
Hi all. This is going to be new to me and the first time I am going at it at designing a keycap set. I hope you guys enjoy it and support this IC.
Prologue : What started this adventure
Behind all keycap set, there is an inspiration that started it. It could be an experience someone had, an event that trigger the spark of the idea or an anime that someone watch. For sets that are based on a base material(i.e. a book, anime or manga), there is a limited amount of material one could get hold of. In this case, it would be a language barrier. Not all light novel or manga would make its way to the English world as not everything would have an English translation. Unfortunately, that is the case of one of my favourite series : 三角の距離は限りないゼロ. Some of you have heard of it as Bizarre Love Triangle from the manga adaptation of the first volume of the light novel. Those that read Chinese may have encountered the Chinese translation of the book. With the after story releasing in a couple of days time (I only found out about it a couple of days back), it would be a great idea to introduce the series to you via this set.
Chapter 1 : The pre order plan
I hate keycap group buys. Some take a long time to arrive. By the time the set arrive to your door step, you may have forgotten that you have bought it in the first place. In fact when I plan to build my first keyboard, I joined a keycap group buy and joined case over a year later when set enters production. Which is why the set will be a pre order/in stock. By the time the set enters pre order phase, production should have started. The pre order phase will end around the same time production is completed. This will give vendors some time to settle payment before the keycaps ship to the vendor. This way you will get group buy pricing without group buy waiting time. Of course, there is a catch. The M in MOQ for this set will stand for maximum, not minimum. Yes your eyes is not tricking you. There will be a maximum order quantity for the pre order. If the demand is higher than the MOQ, I will run more pre orders until the demand is met. Any extra set left will be sold as a in stock by the vendors as in stock pricing (this will be left at the vendors discretion). I may change the process a little to improve it. I also hope that this will push more sets in the future to be a pre oder/in stock.
Chapter 2 : The Kit
For this set, there will be 2 kit planned : A base kit and an extra kit. It will be a cherry pbt dye sub set produced by Keyreactive. I choose them since I am also in Asia and it would be easier to work with them due to time zones. The base kit would be compatible with most popular keyboard layout such as 60%, 65%, 75% TKL and alice style keyboards. For those that want more compatibility or more options to customized your keyboard, the extra kit would do that. It will allow you to use full size keyboards, ortholinears, some 40% and macro/num pads. The will also give you some novelties and accents to play with. The 2 sets will make logistics easier when it becomes an in stoke set.
The colours used are : Pantone 2085C, Pantone 326C and Pantone 184C
Some of you may have noticed that the Hiragana in the kit is a bit different than those in most keycaps. Since the inspiration comes from a light novel, I compare the fonts we have in windows to find one that better match those in the book. The font I landed on was Yu Mincho. Below is a picture of one page of the book so you could understand what I mean.
Chapter 3 : Vendors and Pricing
TBD
Chapter 4 : Future
To do :
Confirm Kitting
Confirm Vendors and Pricing
Samples
Start Production
Start Pre orders
Chapter 5 : Renders
Zoom65
Iron180
M0lly
Maja
A signature you can use
Edit (Small Updates) :
30/3/23: from feedback, I change F13 to accent colour and added 1.5u enter key to extra kit. I also added a to do list since I forgotten about previously.
