At the beginning of this month my friend Suited Up Keycaps offered a limited run for the Hands on Deck – The Laser GMK Short Story hero artisan keycap. He gave shape to the main character of the story – Hayley “Agent 88” Han throughout this year and we had lots of fun prototyping and creating her.
The number of keycaps offered had to be limited, so he could deliver to our community without negatively impacting his routine and personal life. We also wanted to offer his popular artisan keycap sculpts officially color matching the keycap set, so this ended up adding another layer of difficulty to the number of keycaps available. Truly beautiful work, it was an incredible honor for me to work with such a talented and positive person.
We went through several iterations, polishing the design over and over again, revising the illustrations so we could arrive on the perfect sculpt.
But every hero needs a villain.
So earlier this year I contacted Hot Keys Project, a long time friend that I met during my journey in the mechanical keyboard’s world. We’ve been trying to create something together for a while and we finally had our chance once I conceived the Laser GMK keycap set.
Our plan was to create artisans especially crafted to be combined with the keycap set. Hot Keys Project has extensive experience in modeling interesting characters. You can check some of his work in the catalogue. Hot Keys Project is also well know for extremely high quality blank keycaps, on a variety of colors, shades and tones. Not only for the Cherry MX mount but also Topre. His keycaps are polished, sharp and smooth looking, not only to the eyes but also to the touch.
In order to explore Hot Keys Project best techniques and creativity we created two distinct line of products – neon blanks and an exclusive all new character design. Hot Keys Project and I studied the cyberpunk and retrowave references, aiming to give form to an evil entity pursuing good lines, colors and a style to truly represent the villain from Hands on Deck – The Laser GMK Short Story.
He’s called Turbo.
In order to represent the buildings, alleys and streets from Rio, in the year 2088, Hot Keys Project also went ahead and color matched his line of blank artisan keycaps following the Laser GMK keycap set.
The Hot Keys Project x MiTo Artisan keycaps can be purchased for a limited time in the links below, make sure to check them out!
- Turbo, a villain from Hands on Deck – The Laser GMK Short Story
- Laser GMK artisan blanks for Cherry MX and Topre
Working with my dear friends Suited Up Keycaps & Hot Keys Project was an amazing experience and I’m very thankful for these guys for trusting my vision and spending their precious time, resources and efforts teaming up with me. There are several (and I really mean several) other keycap set creators contributing with their talents to the Laser GMK artisans movement, more exciting sculpts and ideas are coming soon. Please keep an eye to this journal and the Laser Shoppo for the upcoming commissions!
Keeb on,
M
MiTo 