There’s also an existing Linear A glyph that I haven’t used yet which I think evokes a butterfly. Here it is on the QWERTY “any” key:
It also didn’t fit well on the QWERTY logo key, and is really pushing it on the “any” key, but I just wanted to find a way to show it, really.
Oh yeah, sure. I literally did it in two minutes and put it on there to roughly fit. Didn’t pay much attention to the line widths.
@jesse, now that I’m looking more carefully at things, I’m wondering how important it is to keep glyphs on the LED side of the webbing. Will the webbing be translucent, or will it block a significant amount of light coming from the LED? I guess my real question is how important is it to keep glyphs from overlapping the webbing, and how important is it to keep them from crossing into other quadrants entirely?
I should have a better answer for this in a couple days. Our goal had been plastic that was somewhat frosted to act as a diffuser. The first few tries from the keycap factory came back too opaque. The other quadrants ended up incredibly dim. After a lot of back and forth, the latest version sound like they’re closer to “water clear”, which is also not quite what I was hoping for, but is likely a better compromise. They should have been mailed to us for testing yesterday. Once they arrive, I can test them out and show you some photos to properly answer your question.
Overlapping the webbing is not ideal, but not catastrophic. Crossing to the bottom right quadrant seems…ok, but not great. Crossing to the top left quadrant is kind of meh. Things in the upper right quadrant are significantly dimmer. On home-row keys where the top right quadrant is small, it’s not the end of the world. On the number keys, however, it’s pretty much the end of the world 
I love and appreciate that you’re going to such lengths to make the absolute best decision about this relatively small detail. Kudos to you!
Thanks. No detail is too small!
In an effort to make everything fit better, I’m doing some serious rearranging and scaling now. Until now, I’ve been placing symbols right up to the edges of the top surfaces of the keys, and that’s clearly no good, especially considering their curvature. I’m also trying to avoid any significant overlap with the webbing, which might block enough light to be noticeable. I realize now that the R0 keys have very little space compared to others, especially between the southwest corner of the top surface and the keystem. I might have this rearrangement done tomorrow.
On another note, now that I’m looking at the palm keys again, I can’t help but notice how much they resemble the eye spots on certain butterflies and moths – in particular, the owl butterfly. Does that give anybody an idea for a non-logo label for those keys?
It certainly sounds like the Butterfly’s antennae may be…
ducks
…unless we put it on the palm keys! =PPPPP
One more iteration of the Linear A keycaps, with quite a few changes in order to keep the symbols over the LEDs and away from the webbing and stems, which might interfere with the uniformity of the light:
I have included a bunch of alternate Linear A symbols, some of which were in the previous version, and a few of which are new. I removed the butterflies from the palm keys. There are a few Linear A symbols that I think might look good there, but some of them have already been found objectionable. I’m still hoping someone comes up with an idea that everyone likes.
These are looking great, thanks again for putting so much work in to this!
I really like the ‘small hand plane’? symbol (top row, second from left in the centre block). It also has a matching L/R flipped symbol in the codepage (which is already where the 7 is on the default layout). Maybe we could have those on the palm keys? I realise that involves finding a replacement for the other, though.
That’s worth a try, but I think it would be better to use symbols that are wider (or generally larger) because of the size of the palm keys and the placement of their LEDs. I think it looks better for a centered symbol to fill more of the key, and because the LED is on the “bottom” half of the palm key, it would also be good for that symbol to be narrower at the bottom than at the top (like the Keyboardio butterfly logo). I’ve got one Linear A symbol in mind, but it doesn’t have the same mirror image beauty that your “handplane” idea has.
I’ll make some more mockups soon, and I’ll definitely include the “handplanes” as one of them. Then maybe I can find one that looks like a drawknife or a tenon saw…
As the palm keys are the “fn” keys on the QWERTY layout, how about placing Linear A symbols which evoke branching on the palm keys in this layout?
Maybe they should each have a palm tree symbol. 
Hey, that was my original idea!
I would go for it, if you can make one that looks good with the Linear A style!
In the event no palm tree symbol can be created, how about 𐙋 (U+1064B), or 𐙴 (U+10674), or 𐚕 (U+10695)? (The Unicode code points were copied from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A_(Unicode_block).)
And yes, this would mean replacing 𐚕 (U+10695) as it is already in use on the left hand.
(My suggestion for a replacement would be the teal block character in the middle row, first on the left (it looks to be a cleaned-up version of 𐚥 (U+106A5)). This character would then be the counterpoint to the pottery jug in the lower right corner of the right hand (which looks to be a cleaned-up version of 𐚯 (U+106AF)).)
@jesse, regarding deadlines, what is the current estimate for start of keycap production? (As that is the date we would need to have the Runic keycaps finalized before.)
Excellent suggestions. I had already considered 𐙴 (U+10674), and thought it was a bit on the tall and thin side, but it’s worth a shot. 𐚕 (U+10695) is one of my favorites, but I hadn’t thought of putting it on the palm keys. Here’s a list of symbols that are at least somewhat tree-like:
𐘝 (U+1061D) (“figs”, according to John Younger)
𐙋 (U+1064B) (“olives”, ibid)
𐙨 (U+10668) (I’d make it symmetrical)
𐙭 (U+1066D)
𐙴 (U+10674)
𐚕 (U+10695)
There’s also this one, which resembles a palm frond: 𐘃 (U+10603)
There’s also one that I like a lot, but which doesn’t fit well almost anyplace else, and has a little bit of butterfly resemblance: 𐘩 (U+10629).
I’ll produce images for all of these (and any others people suggest) when I get the time.
Last, there seems to be a certain amount of agreement among scholars about the likely syllables represented by some of the Linear A symbols (due to the obvious relationship with Linear B, in which many of the same symbols were used to represent a different language), and we could sort of spell out “Keyboardio” (ki-po-re-di-o, more or less), either on the palm keys or elsewhere. I like the idea, in principle, so I thought I’d mention it, but the symbols involved don’t look so great to me.
Heh. 
When I see that glyph, I see a head of grain (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Usdaemmer1.jpg, Emmer - Wikipedia).
As for the pairs I like out of your list:
Also, due to the size of the palm keys, can we get away with larger glyphs (which would then mean we can use glyphs with finer detail)? If, so pair 2 above would likely look impressive; though pair 1 would be closer to keeping with the æsthetic of the rest of the layout.
Absolutely. For example, I had simplified 𐘩 (U+10629) to fit it on a different key by giving it only three vertical lines on each side, but on the palm keys, I’d make it large enough for all four. I’m inclined to use larger, perhaps more complex, symbols, but with the same line width as on the other keys. And I think wider symbols will probably look better than tall, skinny ones, because of this:
Also, since we probably want each palm key symbol to be centered on the keycap, there is a potential issue with the webbing, which will run vertically down the middle of that symbol. If it turns out that the webbing blocks a significant amount of light, we might not want something with a prominent vertical center line. One possible way to mitigate that problem (if it is a problem) would be to rotate the symbol to align it with the keys in the main part of the keyboard. This would work much better for some symbols than others, I’m sure.
