Best way to visualize keycap mods?

[tenfour]

I'm interested in participating in the round 4 group buy for my Filco Majestouch-2 Tactile, but I am timid about choosing the keycaps. I feel like it's too much guess-work for the price, so I'm considering using photoshop to mock-up what I think my mod will look like. But of course it's time-consuming and not very realistic, thus maybe not productive at all.

So, when you are doing a keycap mod -- if you were in my shoes -- how do you visualize your concept beforehand? Is there an online configuration utility for this? Some other tools? A visio template? Just imagination? Or deep pockets and "give me one of everything and I'll try it out later" mentality?

[SmallFry]

1) Gimp it.
2) WASD keyboard config thingy and then adapt it to your needs

[N8N]

Personally, I'd be tempted to use AutoCAD, but that's likely because I'm way more comfortable using that than the GIMP.

I should really get more fluent with image editing software, but there's only so much free time, and I used AutoCAD professionally for about 6 years, give or take.

If you want to go the AutoCAD route, bug the crap out of me, I could knock together a template for a Filco/Leopold/Noppoo-esque generic keyboard fairly rapidly, and I think that if I layered it right, you could change the color of the keys pretty easily, and also apply global font changes etc. by assigning a few dimension styles to the various parts of the board (e.g. one dim style for the alphas, one for the numbers across the top, one for the numpad, etc.) so if you changed the font for that dim style it would take effect over that whole group of keys.

[hashbaz]

I have a GIMP template that I can color in.

[tenfour]

The wasd customizer seems ideal but isn't a realistic image and can feel tedious to use. Photoshop is yet more tedious and took a while for me to get a template going, but the result seems like a decent preview.

In the end I did spend most of my messing around in the wasd customizer, and then did mockups with photoshop.

N8N: Don't spend your time making an autoCAD template for me. I don't have autoCAD and I don't care about this *that* much But if someone did develop a keyboard customizer app I have the feeling lots of people would use it, and with the right features it could also make the round 4 group buy seem less like rocket science, and maybe more successful.

[SmallFry]

I'm thinking autocad would be a nice thing to take a screenshot of and then fill via PS/GIMP. I may have to make a template just for s&g in my engineering class. i7's and 8gigs of ram in those cad machines... windoze though. But hardware beats linux in this case