This is a rant about artisans and I feel it needs to be said.
If you have soft feelings and don't like it hard and raw I'd advise you stop reading now you poor sappy bastard.
The current state of artisans is a conglomerate of ****. The colour ways, the designs, the quality control. As such I will break this down into those three categories.
Ever since artisan making has become more mainstream, more and more caps have been coming out in wild colour schemes that don't seem to fit ANY sets. This isn't bad on its own BUT recently a lot of these colour ways don't actually look good period. Now keycaps are a pretty easy palette to work with, you've generally got, black, white, beige or a combination of both. If you want to 'pull' a keyboard together (the colours fit together nicely), say with beige caps, just throw some muted tones of the colour you want to pop in there. Whether that's muted green, pink, blue, whatever. I'm telling you right now I'm not putting a ****ing bright rainbow coloured cap on my sleek custom with dyesubs in classic beige. That's horrendous. I've asked friends IRL what they think of certain people's boards and I've shown them the keyboard and told them what do you think of this (insert someone's keyboard with mismatching artisan) and often the response I get is 'What the **** is up with that weird key? It looks alright if it didn't have that on it' And I've done this with more photo's than I have fingers and toes to count on.
I'm not saying that vendors should go out and start pumping the muted caps out at all, but when designing a keycap take into consideration what its going to look like on a keyboard with other key caps. A good example of this is the latest clacks that CC has put out.
Herr Freitag + Friday Jr. by
Zach Robert, on Flickr
Do you think that by some miracle CC somehow fluked the colour way and it looks good on beige? **** no, a good bit of thought went into that design which is blatantly obvious by its popularity.
Hurr hurr, what should we do then? I suggest this.
TAKE A LOOK AT A ****ING COLOUR WHEEL YOU THICK C.... - just take a look at a colour wheel...
^good muted tone wheel, stronger tone wheel for those interested ->
http://willkempartschool.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/colourwheel01.gifComplimentary colours on on the opposite side to each other if ya didn't know. As with all rules there can be exceptions but its one hell of a good starting point when coming up with what to pair what with. That said, I think every once in a blue moon, making a striking artisan isn't all that bad either, it is art after all, but you damn better be sure that cap looks nice colours aside, which leads us into..
Keycap design. Unlike colours, design is even more so an subjective topic. It's harder to master and even harder to produce something that looks good. At least with colours there are some sort of 'guidelines' that can be followed.
Take a look at the Brobot V2
Image courtesy of ramnes
Instant classic design. This is supported by the the prices that it goes for on ebay as we all know. But that just it. It's one design. And since then brocaps has made a few other good designs such as the reapers (IMO both the reaper classic and the OG reaper aren't too shabby, I quite like the R
eaperC
lassic) but also has made some bad designs. IIRC there were some caps that sold BELOW retail on MM. Does that mean he's a bad designer? Hell no, thats progression. You make some bad ones and you make some good ones. But I bet you any money brocaps hasn't put out way more than half the designs he's come up with because he wasn't happy with them. You don't always hit a home run, sometimes you stike a foul and live with it. But you certainly don't keep putting out ****ty designs if you know they are ****ty (and yes I KNOW
YOU KNOW THEY'RE ****TY, don't even TRY to lie to yourself
taking other maker's here not brocaps)
I'm going to relate to this personally. You wanna know how many hours I've spent on a photo shoot to get to the end result and just be unhappy with it all and never post them?
HUNDREDS LOTS (it'd be close by now though) I'd be a fool to not admit I've some degree of vainity when it comes to expressing myself artistically, and I'm still not happy with 90% of the photos on my flickr. Although for me at least, being vain has introduced a safety net for sub par photos and some sort of discipline when releasing content (and yeah, if you're in the know how than that's why there is no ****ing videos yet, wait until next year
don't concern yourself if you don't know what this means)
A scenario that I didn't think I'd share until now, is when I went out camping on top of a mountain to get 1 photograph that turned out like crap and I never posted it. I packed a swag (which weighs like 15 kilo's or about 30 pounds), a bag full of camping gear (about another 10 kilo's), an entire camping chair, and my camera gear (tripod, camera, lenses, etc..) put it all on my back and hiked up a mountain to get a 1 (ONE) photo. I set up my gear and tripod and waited 5 hours to get different shots of the sun going down in order to do a single photo that looked something a little like
this. By no means a small amount of effort for a single photograph and if I didn't like hiking to begin with I probably wouldn't have done it but I digress.
I never posted it. And there isn't anything wrong with that and I feel better for it. My point is, have some sense of pride when putting out a cap. It's YOUR work and everyone is going to judge you for it. Don't be THAT guy that puts out terrible caps. Don't delude yourself into thinking that what you've made is a good design because people have replied to your work telling you its great. This isn't 4chan so people aren't going to flame you over a bad design, they're going to encourage you to get better. And people
are going to buy it because this is keyboards the economy of this hobby is absolutely retarded. YOU know when its a bad design, unlike photography I encourage you to post it and show almost a history of your work getting better. But please, have some sort of restraint when selling people this **** because the amount of keyboards I've seen with some god aweful caps on them is ridiculous.
The only thing here that should be strictly adhered to, everything else is subjective:QC (quality control for the uninitiated) section is going to be brief. Don't sell caps with bubbles in them and if you do try your damn hardest to make them bubble free. If you can't get all the bubbles out, figure out how to hand cast as well as you can and come up with some sort of guideline for yourself where you can differentiate the caps by a level of quality and sell what is over that mark and trash the rest. I've got a hand cast binge cap that has one bubble in it and I'm ok with that cause it's not riddled with them like some caps are.
I'm buying a keycap not a sponge. To wrap this up here's some sort of advise. TAKE A LOSS. You've got to take the good with the bad and understand that you aren't always going to put out top notch stuff and its a lot of hard work. That's the nature of life, keycaps are no different. There is nothing wrong with with imperfect caps, whether it be the colour way, design or QC. But have some restraint when selling to people.
END. - sorry it was so long
Supporting sentences that don't fit anywhere else
I wish I could post pictures to support this rant but in order to not be put on a pitchfork and paraded around, I won't make an example of peoples bad caps.
Making an argument about something artistic is hard so I hope you understand where I'm coming from. Although art is subjective, people have a general sense of what looks good and what doesn't, otherwise we wouldn't put certain 'forms' of art on a pedestal (i.e. fashion and body image come to mind for lack of a better example).
If you don't think I know the hard work that goes into making keycaps let me tell you something cowboy. When I first got into keyboards it was all the hype. I went out and I bought the super sculpy, the resin, the dentists tools, the silicon the real deal. I know how hard it is and the reason you don't see any caps from me is because I'm really really bad at making keycaps. Embarrassingly so. Believe me I know the work that goes into it. I've 'wasted' a lot of time in my artistic ventures, but I don't consider it a waste. That's where the loss comes into it. I learnt from my experiences.
For reference:
Keycaps = keycaps that you type on
Artisans = sculpted plastic
EDIT: Seems to be some confusion. Things I'm not saying are:
1. Make perfect caps, this is impossible
2. **** YOU ****TY ARTISAN MAKERS
3. Don't sell anything
4. Only use complimentary colours. It's a starting point
5. Copy clack or bro or anyone else. They're used as examples and that's the end of it
6. These colour ways are bad waaa stop making them (go a head man, makes no difference to me, more power to ya)
What I am saying:
1. You will make bad designs, when starting out. Or maybe not. Sell them if you want, I mean free market man, but don't keep flogging a dead horse so to speak if you know its bad
2. Take pride in your work, take pride in your work, take pride in your work, take pride in your work, take pride in your work, take pride in your work, take pride in your work.
3. If anything, I'm giving insight into an open market. There seems to be a lack of matching caps (which appeal to people who share the same tastes as I), thus why my wallet is not drained.
And no, I have not bought a whole bunch of bad artisans and this is the result. I vote with my wallet. One of my favourite sayings is "If I don't like it, I don't swallow" ratatouille movie by the way guys, before you get too excited...
If you are going to pick this argument apart with technicalities **** off. REAL TALK ONLY
BTW if you came to the conclusion that I'm aggressive, I'm not, just Australian, this is how I talk, its all fun and games with keyboards, but I did feel this needed to be posted
