Keycap Kevin: designing my own keycaps

Besides the case, keycaps are the visual highlight of a keyboard. They give your keyboard that personal touch. Sets are a dime a dozen. But I want to design my own keycaps. Thanks to various online tools even I, an artistically-challenged user, can achieve some pretty decent designs.

Getting started with Keyboard Layout Editor

I’ve only used Keyboard Layout Editor to create, well, keyboard layouts so far. But the tool can also change the colour of buttons and give you a first idea of whether a design looks good.

But before I start designing, I have to think about which colours actually go together. I recently bought a wall clock. I’d like to see its colour scheme on a keyboard. I copy an image of the clock and paste it in the Image Color Picker. It approximates the various colour codes of the clock. I enter these in the Keyboard Layout Editor. However, the whole thing doesn’t look as sexy there as I imagined.

Luckily, I can download my design as a JSON file. I feed this into KLE-render, which comes up with a slightly prettier version of my design. Here’s what that looks like:

The computer-generated image still isn’t polished, but it’s enough for a first impression. I create four more drafts. For all of them, I take inspiration from pictures and products that I think have an interesting colour scheme.

Once I’ve assembled five designs, I run a quick poll. Posting the designs to our Teams channel, I ask, «All ugly, or does one work for you?»

Refining with Blender

One of the responses: «Ugly is such a strong word. When you throw up all over an apartment, that’s ugly.» Thank you, but what do I do with that statement? Still, my colleagues are slightly helpful, and I come to the conclusion that I should pursue drafts one, two and five.

To do this, I download a Blender template from Dakota Felder. I choose a Cherry keycap template . After all, I want to create a design for the manufacturer GMK. They use this specific profile and still make the best caps, from my point of view.

Turns out the same user who made the template also uploaded a tutorial on how it works. As it turns out, the whole thing is very simple. I just have to click on the keycaps I want to customise and change the colour. Since I want to design GMK keycaps, I’ll stick with the manufacturer’s standard colours for now. I can choose between 34 colours for the keycaps and labels.

After a few adjustments to my initial suggestions, I end up with three computer-generated images. I name them after my sources of inspiration, «Timeless», «Raspberry Harvest» and «Hooray, the world is ending».

Got keycaps?

Given it’s my first time, I’m quite pleased and eager to pursue a design through to production. It’d be pretty cool to someday type on a keycap set that I designed.

Even my colleagues warmed up to one or the other proposal. Just for fun, I’m designing another set called «digitec edition».

What do you think? Would you buy one of these sets in a Swiss keyboard layout? Who knows, maybe if there’s enough interest we’ll even have a set produced and sell it in the store…