Sometimes I put thought in things. Best to catch those moments whenever I can.
The more I look at this set the more I like it. The daytime shots of the caps also look very nice for a set that only really needs to look good in the dark to fulfill its true purpose.
I keep meaning to put more focus on the non-glow presentation as this will be pretty much 80% of use-cases - they do indeed look nice, a pleasant off-white light cream, a "soft"-looking effect, similar to pictures of white POM or silicone that I have seen. I'm working on renders right now, fingers crossed I can figure out the right materials as GID, in both daylight and night, is hard to recreate, but the people like seeing renders to get that extra injection of interest.
How about something like Slimer (From Ghostbusters) and/or a text one that read 'He Slimed Me!'
Copyright stuff will be hard to get past the SP check. Generally, though, it's hard to get a design that contains an image or object that should be glowing - a silhouette doesn't do it justice, and a line outline is a little anaemic. The "blob" I already have is a good example of a design is nice in theory but that doesn't work in context.
I wonder if gradients are possible here. If not a smooth one, perhaps a dot gradient, allowing light to shine through while providing a gradient effect? With the glow, gradients can provide interesting effects. I wonder how fine we can make the dots with dye-sub.
Dot gradient example (aka halftone):
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EDIT: Not just for gradient, but also for tone contrast i.e. some parts shine bright, others less so
Adding on to my previous post on gradient, a little mockup I did to try to illustrate. One of various ways we can use gradients.
Lord Vader in dot gradient on the left, non-gradient on the right:
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Shrunk (not a perfect dot gradient here since I just resized, resulting in gray pixels.. just an illustration):
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I've been trying out a few ideas similar to this. The "glow array" in the OP is an attempt at gradient, and the projected boxes with the line-shading is a different tack. I have a few other thoughts I've not had time to sit down and put on screen which I'll work on a little later. The fabrication is a bit of a limitation on this - the resolution is limited (though better than double-shot), bleed needs to be kept under control, and the surface of keycaps is pretty small, so the design needs to be as simple as possible. I think I can get the eyeball to work, and I really like the idea of a magazine/print point-style effect, but the Vader is too complex.
Same goes for the mushrooms earlier in the thread - I like the idea, but the design is limited to linework for an outline and some detail, but then the glowing object is on a glowing background, unless the top is blacked out like a pudding keycap, which doesn't really work for me, and a silhouette would be the opposite of a glowing mushroom. I tried working around this with the angler fish sketch by putting lines on the background for a darker context and a solid silhouette for the fish body. This works OK as the lines are the watery medium fishes tend to live in, I'm not sure how to translate that to other glowing objects without creating the pudding-cap effect. The diamond options are a good case-study in this - can't quite get it working to my liking.
well, regardless of the efficacy of the glowing, i'd personally still prefer the option of having some contrast on the board
I hear you, but this is a mono-colour set. Firstly, I'm in the mono-appreciation club; secondly, given the neutral daytime colouring, standard SP font/profile, and the night-time case making no difference, this is an easy set to mix-n-match with your favourite mods or alphas etc. most people already have. There are other points: only one type of GID plastic SP offers, this being a dye-sub set (which would limit any modifiers to lighter colours anyway), but mostly, as Coco Chanel's apparently once said “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off”--adding contrast caps would over-egg this particular pudding. Thx Mogo and Parva for the excellent examples. I hadn't seen the "87" key before, but that's exactly why SP recommends against double-shooting with GID.
- Extended ISO NORDE support isn't there yet - any specific requests for this?
Full Norde like SA Carbon or SA Oblivion:
R3 ALT GR 1U / R3 ALT GR 1.25 / ALT GRAPH 1.5
With tertiary legends (!)
R4 1.25 Shift
Iso enter
Yes please.
I'm afraid you're in a minority of one for NORDE at the moment: ISO tends to not fare too well, let alone NORDE, so g l o w is limited to the UK ISO which I'm not expecting to reach MOQ anyway (we'll see when the MOQ numbers come through from SP, and fingers crossed it does) which has the keys you listed other than AltGr.
Generally, I've been a little slow on further dev as I've had a ton of irl stuff on my plate recently. Messing around with Rhino/VRay today, hoping for some decent results, but as I said earlier in this post, emissive materials are tough to make look good: current experiments are resulting in all-glowing mass with no contrast from key to key as you can't cast shadows and highlights on light-source materials so they come out all flat. As before, more as it develops.
Thanks again to all for the interest and discussion, it's nice to see the idea has some legs. Let's make it happen' cap'n!