Designers Spend Months Making Custom Keycaps, Then the Counterfeits Arrive

An anonymous reader shares a report: Briggs [anecdote in the story] is part of a growing movement of artists and designers who produce alternatives to the stock keycaps sold with most mechanical keyboards. The small plastic blocks are easy to detach from their switches using simple pulling tools, and changing them can give a keyboard a radically different look, feel, and sound -- not to mention turn a generic computer accessory into something much more personal. Swapping out keycaps for aftermarket alternatives has become so commonplace that it's not uncommon to see premium keyboards sold without keycaps in the box. But as designer keycaps have become more popular, so have cheaper knockoffs. These keysets use the same color schemes and often even the same names, in an apparent attempt to piggyback off the popularity of original designs. To a casual observer it's rarely obvious that they're produced by an unrelated company, without any input from the designer, and may be capturing sales that could have supported the original creator.

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