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by HelloNurse 1038 days ago
Consider how joyless the designer of the unreadable keycaps must be, their sad life as they remember all the times they willfully damaged their even more clueless customers in pursuit of pseudo-style, looking at life in all its diverse forms, shapes, textures, activities and choosing bad ones for the lulz.

Technical constraints do exist, and if you shit on them you are a pretentious bad designer of products that cannot be taken seriously.
2 comments
jrockway 1038 days ago
I don't know how y'all type, but typically looking at a keyboard is only something you do for your first year after encountering a computer for the first time. After that, the keyboard takes up your desk, but isn't something you look at in order to use. Thus, keycaps optimized for looking nice while not in use makes more sense than keycaps optimized for being readable. You shouldn't be reading keycaps while you type, because you have a limited field of view and what's showing up on the screen is more relevant than what keys are being pressed.

So the designer doing "I can just focus on art" is probably experiencing more joy than the designer doing "this has to be as cheap as possible" or "this is a keyboard for children learning to touch type", simply because the scope of work is so much more unconstrained. Art could be anything! A keyboard for people learning to use computers is going to mostly be letters.

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Nullabillity 1038 days ago
Maybe not every keyboard has to be designed for hunt-and-peckers. It's not even particularly original, Das Keyboard has sold blank keyboards for a decade, and many mobile keyboards have supported hiding the key labels for ages too (I've used it in Fleksy and MessagEase, but I'm sure many others have it too).

Maybe it's not for you. That's okay. If it's been a niche for this long then I doubt it's gonna be the default anytime soon.

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prepend 1038 days ago
I had a das keyboard blank face for a few years and really liked it.

I ended up getting rid of it because my org’s password rules were annoying and I struggled to touch type symbols and numbers that weren’t in a word. And whenever I had “guests” it was uncomfortable to them and me so I would have to keep a guest keyboard anyway.

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