deskthority

While I am waiting for Round 5 to finalize and ship, I find myself working on a lot of layout variations. Obviously, these particular layouts cannot be achieved with Round 5, or any other keycaps in existence that I know of, as there are at least 11 new molds that would have to be created.

Here is the keyboard:
And corresponding numpad:
I think that the effect of standing off sections of a keyboard with rows and columns of stepped keys (and no space between them otherwise) would be quite visually striking. Maybe someday we could find out.

Nice idea, we don't see many double-stepped key caps these days.
Did you look at SP's DCS family? Not all of your desired shapes are available but quite a few are.
http://keycapsdirect.com/pdfs/DCSFamily.pdf

Stunning design, triple and quad stepped island keys with great colourways and interesting legends. I like how much you've got going on the numpad, if it was me I'd move the cursor arrows nearer the other cursor keys in favour of the copypasta though I can see the advantage of "normally" positioned cursors too.

I am surprised that there doesn't seem to have been any group buys for stepped DCS sets before, nearly everything obvious including vertical keys already exists, except a 2.75. I'm thinking in this case you have SA in mind though.

Group buys concentrate on the "mainstream" use people have for new caps: to upgrade a standard keyboard. The first goal of every organiser has to be to hit the minimum order quantity, otherwise the GB won't happen. So what we end up with is a lot of standard full-size and TKL kits and general purpose extras that will fit on Filcos and the like, but not much attention to the more exotic stuff.

I'm a builder too, and would love to see some more of the catalogue of possible caps opened up. But it's a slow process. 7bit's doing a good job at commissioning extra tooling at SP, with the SPH/REPAIR kit of several previously impossible keys this round and his goal of going high hat next time. The funds to do that come primarily from all the basic kits that are going straight on existing keyboards.

I'd love a set of those double Greek alphas, when they come about!

I'd certainly be interested in doing something similar to this, perhaps dialed back a bit to only include existing molds, with double Greek alphas, at some point after round 5 is done with and shipped. I'll look at the DCS pdf a little more closely and see what I can come up with.

Here is a revision with only keycaps that exist according to the SA pdf, at least as far as I can figure out. The numpad and keyboard parts are intended to be separate parts, but I put the images together so they would be displayed at the correct size next to each other.
All of the stepped keys are R3. DSA has more variety of stepped and hat keys in multiple row profiles, I'll do a revision with that next.

Here is the DCS version:

SA wins! As always.

Muirium wrote:SA wins! As always.

But hat keys!

Looking at the SA pdf again, since SA really is my preference, I might have been a little over optimistic. The layout calls for a bunch of 1.25 unit step keys, and the line on the pdf actually says "1 x 1.25, .5 step L or R" which seems to indicate that the touch surface would be .75 units, which wouldn't be suitable. There is no step ISO return, either. DCS has the step ISO return and I am confidant that, at least if the pdf is accurate, all of the called for keys exist for my layout, aside from the legends of course.