It’s not every day that you get the opportunity to design your own custom keyboard, but the incredibly generous people at wasd offered me exactly that and, to be perfectly honest, I got a bit overwhelmed.
wasd offer a range of fully customisable mechanical keyboards. When I say fully customisable, I don’t just mean that you can choose from a range of different keyswitches and colourways though. I mean that you can also choose between five case colours, and choose the key colour, character colour, and character(s) on each individual key. You could do anything! Anything. Any thing…
So, I ran through some ideas on their online keyboard designer, and the hours flew by. I lost a day to keyboard design, basically. At the end of all of my hard work, I sat back and realised that I had essentially just designed myself a 1984 Amstrad CPC 464 with bright green characters. Which did look cool, but ultimately seemed like a slightly odd thing to have done with this opportunity. So I asked Leah for some help, and we started again.
And this (above) is what arrived very shortly afterwards.
We went with the 88 key (UK layout) ISO keyboard with a black case. Cherry MX silent red keyswitches, woodland, olive, brown, and yellow keys with contrasting yellow/brown characters. What we congratulated ourselves on as very tasteful aesthetic choices were only slightly undermined by our eleven-year-old son saying that he liked the new “camo keyboard”.
Although it looks beautiful, this is a sturdy, solid, wired, desktop keyboard. No backlights. No unnecessary, flashy extras. It’s a workhorse, made for someone who is at their desk every single day typing and typing and typing. Which is why, with two huge projects on the go currently, Leah has ended up with the wasd as her primary keyboard.
Previously, Leah was typing on an all-black, low profile, 101 key, bog-standard Acer keyboard. The wasd’s contrasting keys have made a difference in peripheral vision key recognition, she reckons. The switches are nice and quiet, but typing is still satisfyingly “chunky”, and the more tactile, sculpted keys are a big improvement on than the old, flat Acer ones. She’s been especially impressed with the weight and sturdiness of the wasd board; it feels really solid and reassuringly heavy. Her only complaint has been that she’s missing her Numpad, having gone down from 101 keys to 88.
If you’re someone, or you know someone, who is sat typing at their desk day after day; someone who isn’t necessarily gadget mad, but who deserves to have something high-quality and just a little bit “extra” at their fingertips, then these might be the keyboards for you. Just be prepared to lose a few hours, maybe a day, in designing and re-designing.
wasd’s custom keyboards start at $165 (US) for 61 key models.