we are Jelly Key
We are Steven Tran and Augustino Nguyen. We’ve been making artisan keycaps by hand in Vietnam since 2015, and more than a hundred series have left the studio since then. Every one of them was sculpted, cast and painted by people who spent years learning what resin does when you aren’t looking.
We didn’t get here quickly. Every technique we trust today came out of hundreds of pours that failed first. We’ve never been a marketing company and never wanted to be one. We’d rather spend the hours at the bench, and with the people who keep what we make, than spend them chasing attention.
made by hand
An artisan keycap starts as a sketch and ends as something you can type on. We sculpt the master by hand, cast a silicone mould, then pour resin in thin layers, setting pigment, wood, watch gears or glow powder where the design needs them. Then demould, trim, sand, polish, paint. Nothing here is printed.
a small canvas
One keycap, usually Escape or Enter, is the thing your eye keeps coming back to on a keyboard you stare at all day. So that’s where the art goes. The themes come from whatever is around us that year, coral reefs, forests, quiet landscapes, small stories. A tool you touch all day shouldn’t be anonymous.
built to last
Years of practice taught us where keycaps fail, so we build against it. Every keycap gets the same finish whether it’s a one-off or part of a run of three hundred, and each one carries a serial number on its dog tag. We still spend a lot of our time testing new resins and pigments. A craft that stops learning isn’t one.
We make them by hand on purpose. In a day that otherwise moves between screens, a handmade keycap is a reminder that some things are still shaped slowly, by people, one at a time. It’s also why no two of our keycaps come out the same, and why the small differences between them aren’t faults. Plenty of the ideas we spent months on have been copied and sold by other people, sometimes before our own run reached the ones who waited for it. That stung. We didn’t want to spend our years arguing about it, so we went back to the bench and made work that’s harder to copy than it looks. Anyone can take a design in an afternoon. The failed casts behind it don’t come along with it.
Some designs turned out much harder than we thought on the day the group buy opened. We’ve spent whole nights on one color, or on a detail no bigger than a grain of rice, and we’ve let runs slip by months because certain pieces simply won’t come out right in a hurry. A Jelly Key keycap gets made once and never again, so the one you end up with has to be right. We could have shipped them anyway and let the flaws through. We didn’t.