It took forever but it’s kinda sorta semi-official that we will soon™ release licensed Tolkien keyboards, keycaps, desktop mat, …

It’s not clear yet how much stuff we are going to do, but I would like to start from a few sets of Elven and –this time also– Dwarven keycaps. Both being composed by extremely complicated glyphs we can’t do double-shot, so this is going to be MT3 profile in PBT material with dye-sublimated legends. It is somehow limiting in the color selection (we can’t use light on dark schemes) but we can use any sort of iconography from the Tolkien world.

So let’s start from Dwarvish. We neglected the fierce bearded folks in the past and it’s time to rectify this unspeakable wrong. Please note that nothing is final, but I started working on something that looks like this:

It’s not easy to write in Dwarwish because we don’t have a lot of reference material, but at least we can transliterate. I did a quick job “translating” the modifiers to Dwarvish and I’m sure I made some mistakes, but it’s a starting point.

If there’s any Tolkien fanatic out there, please reach out, I’m sure there are many things that can be done better and we need to work on the novelty keys of course.

And of course we have Elvish. I’ve already worked on that one in the past but what I’d really like this time is green theme. For some reasons it’s not easy to work with green. White+Green usually works very well but I don’t think it’s the mood that I want. I started to lay out some tests (no 3d renders) and this is what I am after:

Again, everything’s is a work in progress, please post your comments and suggestions. We have a lot time to make changes.

I’d also like a third set inspired by the Dark Speech. With dye-sub we can’t go too dark, but there are nice examples of black on dark-gray (for example the black HHKB) sets, so maybe we can still do something. There’s probably even less material on the Dark Speech so I’m not sure we can actually pull it off, but anyway a Sauron set would be quite interesting.

But it’s not all just about keycaps!

I started few years ago a project for a wooden keyboard (both case and keycaps) and I went as far as purchasing a CNC router to sculpt and carve the keys. No kidding, have a look.

I think it would be the perfect occasion to finally release some kind of Elven wooden keyboard. Everything is still in my mind and I don’t know if feasible and how much it is going to cost, but it’s something I always wanted to do. Let me know you what you think.

If that turns out to be unpractical I may still try to do something simpler like a wooden cases for already existing keyboards with carved Elven text and imagery.

We are in a very preliminary phase, anything could happen so I would love to hear your ideas and suggestions. Please share this post! I need the feedback from the Tolkien shenanigans, I don’t want to screw this up :P