The way it’s almost certain to work is that the pilot run keyboards will have QWERTY caps and everybody will get a free second set of keycaps of their preferred style. It remains to be seen whether those other caps get delivered a little bit later or not.
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Both Bamum and Mende are attractive options.
One issue I want to raise is whether there’s a cultural appropriation issue around adopting glyphs from Mende or Bamum and placing them at ~random on the keyboard.
Both Mende and Bamum are living languages spoken in Africa. Both scripts are relatively modern attempts to give their respective languages a written representation. Neither script appears to be in widespread use today. Instead, as I understand it, Latin glyphs are used for both languages.
I don’t know if this is likely to be a real problem or not, but figured it was at least worth talking about a little bit before we lock anything in.
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That is a good point - if we’re going to have nonsense glyphs on the keys, I would like it if they actually were nonsense, not someone else’s language that I am just ignorant of.
Has anyone mentioned emoji keycaps yet? Half-kidding, but the Symbola font is free & has black-and-white glyphs.
Admin: Since this is really a discussion of layout ideas and not voting systems, I moved some discussion of voting systems over to a new topic. You can find those posts over here
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Maybe we should give Linear A (and/or Linear B) a try. I think ~35 centuries gives us enough distance to make cultural (mis)appropriation a non-issue, though I suspect it won’t look quite as good as our Mende & Bamum candidates.
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I’d make a version with Linear A, which I think has quite a few usable symbols, and which would be fitting because it’s still undeciphered, but the only decent font for it I’ve found is in the Unicode PDF, and my knowledge of fonts is insufficient to make it work with Inkscape. I think it would be easier to make my own SVG glyphs from scratch in Inkscape, but that would take me quite a while, so I wouldn’t want to do it unless people seem genuinely interested (and I’m probably not the best person for the job).
Linear B is available in Noto Sans, but my impression is that most of the glyphs are more complex than what we want.
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Linear A looks decent enough. Linear B doesn’t have enough symbols that are distinct enough to make a good layout from, in my opinion. It seems to have less symbols than Mende, and even with Mende, I had trouble finding good symbols sometimes.
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Maybe one of the fonts on Linear A - Online resources ?
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Yeah, those could have been great…before they all became broken links.
Edit: I found that list earlier; one of the links isn’t broken, but the font is lousy with line-width variation problems.
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Rats. So sorry. I was on my phone in a waiting room and trying to be “helpful”
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Hey all, thanks everyone for taking the time and making so much effort, not only on the research but also on creating the images of the key layouts in place!
I like where the thread is going with the idea of ‘futuristic’, ‘minimal’ and stuff that would generally look good with the LEDs backlit, so I’ll continue to follow it. I just want to make clear that I’ve read the discourse before my comment, otherwise it will look like I’m trying to derail it.
However, to throw a spanner in the works, when I joined the thread I saw the Hieroglyphics and loved that. Reminded me of the weird place Lost went with it’s mix of sci-fi. It’s a great mix of old, new, (to most people) meaningless, and thoroughly interesting glyphs.
I understand if others don’t like it, but I didn’t see any discussion on it after @to1ne suggested it. Are people against it?
There’s a PDF on the Egyptian Hieroglyphics as it’s in the Unicode standard.
Just want to give it a chance 
Thanks all again!
I’m all for more options! Are there enough hieroglyphs that are not overly complex in there? The laser cutting will probably make the more complex symbols unusable.
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Ah valid point, they might lack a decent subset, (there’s a lot of similar looking animals and people in there!) and a few of the symbols are pretty complex.
Updated Mende proposal:
(Original SVG here)
Font size and weight is the same, because the font I use only supports this weight. Tried increasing the size too, but that did not look good enough, so I stayed with what I originally had. As far as I see, there are no duplicate symbols anymore, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
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Oops. Here’s a version with a white background:
Edit: I’m adding a second version, with bolder versions of the Linear A symbols. I did this in a quick and dirty way that doesn’t work so well for all the symbols, but should give a better idea of what it might look like. I used the symbols from the Unicode document, and imported them into Inkscape using Poppler, then did some editing of the SVG by hand to get them bolder. If we decide we like Linear A best (because it’s undeciphered and cultural-appropriation-risk-free), I would go to the trouble of making a new version of each symbol in order to both make them look just right (square, bevel, rounded joins, et cetera) and to make sure there are no copyright issues, but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble unless it gets chosen.
Bold version:
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This is annoying 
. I was firmly in the Bamum camp, but now you’ve made me question that. The Linear A looks really nice! If these are not too complex for the laser process I think I’m now going to vote for Linear A.
Edit B --> A
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@jesse when do we need to settle definitely ? Do you have a deadline for submitting all the layouts to the manufacturer ?
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Just making sure: the one I posted is Linear A, not B.
Until the injection molds and issue with the LEDs are sorted out, the schedule isn’t fixed. Also, the way it’s going to work, we think is that every keyboard will be assembled with QWERTY caps and every preorder will get a free second set of caps.
The QWERTY legends likely need to be finalized within a week or two, but that’s almost completely done. The first samples (with some small errors) should arrive at our place today.
If I were going to draw a line in the sand for the first sets of alternate labels, it’d probably be Christmas, but it might be a little earlier or a little later.
Please let us know if any keys move around on qwerty. You’ve said already that “prog” and “led” switched places, but it’d be good to know if anything else does too (both base and function layer).