Avenir Next legend design concept

[jacobolus]

Hi folks,

Here’s a keycap legend design that uses a bit of a mix of standard Mac / Windows names for things and layout. Clearly not perfect for anyone in particular, but I think it’s a promising start.

For whatever reason, existing keycap legends use a mix of ugly fonts, inconsistent shapes, odd layout choices, etc., such that I’m pretty unhappy with all of them. (If keycap legends are going to be ugly, might as well just use blanks.)



The Avenir Next typeface that ships with OS X now has a bunch of nice typographic features, and I particularly like the appearance of their small caps, so that’s what I used here.

I like the old-style numbers, but they might not be everyone’s favorite.

I assume this would work best as dye-subbed PBT, and could probably work with any key profile, though I’m a big fan of sphericals. But who knows..

[jacobolus]

Also might be fun with italics for the main letter/number keys:


Don’t worry too much about precise layout, colors, etc. at the moment; I’m mainly just curious if people like the fonts & overall idea.

[wuqe]

I had missed this until you posted in the PBT set. Thanks for cross posting, because I love this! in particular, I am a big fan of the symbols on the "number" row, and single legends throughout.

My preference is for non-italic legends, and the I think the old-school numbers are distracting because they don't line up.

Anyway, love the look, and I would love to get hold of the symbol row in row 1 sphericals the moment they are available. (They didn't make it into round 5...)

ETA: What about vertically centering the punctuation? The 'number' row looks great (possibly asterisk is a little high), but the apostrophe and ., are a little distractingly off-centered (off-middled?).

[jacobolus]

Thanks! Yeah, I think I agree about the italics, and maybe the old-style numbers too. :-)

I’m not sure about vertically centered punctuation.. might make it hard to tell ’ apart from , for example (or maybe they can be closer to centered without being completely centered).

Note, I don’t have any plan to push this design through a group buy process or anything (I don’t have that kind of time/organizing ability). But I’m happy to help (at least a little bit) with designing for anyone who is.

Also, I really want some nicer sets of DSA/SA Alps caps. But maybe there’s not enough audience. :/