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Did you think Granite had nothing more to say? Well, think again :) With the collaboration of Signature Plastics I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Granite High Contrast.
All kits from the previous batch of Granite are available in the new dark gray + white color scheme, including the international kit and monologends. Even better you can mix and match the new keycaps with any previous gray Granite you have: they go wonderfully together!
I hope you like them and Happy Holidays!
I feel that I failed to explain why I care so much about the work I’ve done for Granite. Many new members of the community haven’t witnessed the creation of the set and the argument about intellectual property of a keycap set comes out every now and then.
Please do understand that the following is my personal opinion, likely a copyright lawyer would see things very differently.
UPDATE: Granite in currently on sale on PimpMyKeyboard.
Honestly, I had enough of Granite. We had four uber successful batches, everybody got a chance to grab a set by now but it seems I have no control over Granite after all. It lives a life of its own.
There’s still too much interest around the two-shades-of-gray keycaps and many are eager to take advantage of the success of this set. At the point where I thought we could have moved on to the next project I’ve been basically blackmailed: either I run more or someone else will. It already happened to other of my works and I don’t want Granite to pop up on Alibaba with some shady bootleg name (Graneat? Cranite?) and poor overall quality.
Granite Round 4 has finally started shipping to its final destinations, I’ve already seen some nice pictures and I’m glad people are enjoying it.
During the last few years we had quite some iterations of this set and I never took the time to catalog all the keycaps that have been produced. So, it took me some digging into the many backups but I can ultimately show you all the Granite keys that left the Signature Plastics factory lane (excluding blanks) with a good 99% approximation.
Beware! Lots of pictures inside.
Granite Round 4 includes a geeky new kit called “Elven Tongue“. It was gestating in my head since a couple of years now and today finally comes to life thanks to the Granite keycaps set success.
First of all a quick note about the terminology. Is it Elfish, Elvish, Elven, Elfic or what? This –I’m sure– is one of those topics fantasy-fans love to argue about.
Of course the Granite kit is based on Tolkien’s work. Tolkien references to the languages of elves as “Elvish” (with a “v”) but uses Elven in every other occasion. I didn’t want to use a term that directly connected to the Middle Earth (eg: Sindarin) so “Elven Tongue” seemed a good idea.
Now to the nerd talk.
When I first released the Granite set a few years ago I never would have thought I would have seen a Round 4.
I actually wanted to make the first round a limited edition –like all of my designs– but I’ve been accused of being selfish and if the community wanted more I should have let ’em.
So we had Round 2 and it sold twice what the first round did. Again, I thought the world had enough, but boy I was wrong! I was basically receiving a message on Reddit, Geekhack or Deskthority every other day about running the set again.
I reluctantly agreed on Round 3, sure that nobody would have cared about Granite anymore. Round 3 sold even more than the previous run. I’m pretty sure I said Round 3 would have been the last one, not because I didn’t want more, but because I thought the interest on gray keycaps was gone for good. Apparently I was wrong again.
So I’m glad to announce the forth round of Granite. I won’t say that this will be the last one, but I’d like to concentrate on something new for the next time.