Artifact Keycap Series
With the sketches in hand, we made the Artifact keycap series.
You may wonder where the ideas behind our keycap series Artifact came from. Oasis, Temple Dance, and next, The Forbidden Realm.
In this late update we want to show you the sketches behind those keycaps.
The ideas come from topographic maps, the kind people use to lay out the natural and man-made features of an area.
We drew our own topographic maps first.
With the sketches in hand, we created Artifact Keycap Series.
We started the journey to the Frozen Realms by blind drawing, one layer at a time on the screen. Blind drawing means you hold the whole topographic scene in your head while it sits in front of you as a stack of flat 2D slices. The designer has to see how a cave would look from nothing but that arrangement of vectors, and those vectors go to the laser cutter, piece by piece, on a new wooden sheet. After that our craftsman layered them in the order the 2D sketches set out. That step takes real concentration, and it is harder than Forbidden Realms was. There the topography was layered bottom to top on a bottom layer that stayed one intact square. Here the bottom layer is cut into separate pieces, so arranging them in the exact positions takes far more effort, and one piece out of place ruins the whole structure. Each design is finished in a single pass. Once the craftsman reaches the top layer, there’s no going back.
The next step covers the topography with sleet, a few plants that belong to nowhere on Earth, and the glow worms inside the cave. We spent a while working out how the color should read against a whiteout alpine background, and ended up with several options for you. The glaciers gave us the most trouble. We wanted a combination that made sense and still looked good on the cap, and we got there. Finally we filled the mould with transparent resin to form the profile Cherry, and SA rows 1 and 3, so you have nearly a dozen options to choose from.