Group BuyKeycaps

💫 GMK Chaos Theory 💫 | GB Ends November 15th!

by Dotnick

$110.00 - $115.00

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Description

GMK Chaos Theory

Hey everyone,

It has been a long time coming but here it finally is, GMK Chaos Theory! I have been really inspired recently by the topic of chaos theory and everything that is involved including parallel dimensions, multiple universes, the duality of chaos and order, and the math/physics that underpins all of this as well. These are pretty abstract concepts to distill into a keycap set, but I hope you all find something to enjoy out of it!

Vendors

US: Mekibo
CA: Ashkeebs
SA: Fancy Customs
EU: CandyKeys
UK: proto[Typist]
OCE: SwitchKeys
SEA: iLumkb
PHI: Zion Studios
S. Korea: KLC Playground
CN/Int'l: KBDFans

GB will run from October 8, 2021 to November 15, 2021.

Expected delivery: Q4 2022

Pricing

Colors

I was going through my late father's comics collection when I stumbled upon a box of old sci-fi artwork from the 70s and 80s that absolutely stunned me. While it is hard to put colors to the abstract themes of chaos theory, I found that these comics and the dystopian or sometimes euphoric scenes that they depict did a wonderful job of synthesizing the concepts of parallel dimensions, alternate realities, and much more into lush color palettes.

This first unnamed piece by Yoshihisa Sadamatsu inspired the fundamental colors of the set.

I pulled much of the inspiration for the accent colors around the three fundamental colors of the set from these pieces:

1) Unnamed piece by Anton Brzezinski

2) Plains of Tartarus by Bruce Pennington

3) Colonies in Space by TA Heppenheimer (1977)

4) Lost World, vol. 1 by Bruce Pennington

These last two pieces guided me artistically:

5) Unnamed piece by Hiroshi Manabe (early 70s)

6) The Man in the Maze by Bruce Pennington

Kits

The Order and Chaos base kits provide support for 60%, 65%, 75%, and TKL layouts for terminal ISO and ANSI layouts. There is also support for ergonomic/split keyboard layouts (split space bars and a second B). The R4 2.25U shift supports 660-like and type K layouts. F13 requiring boards and 40% keyboards (R3 1.50U Enter, R3 1.25U Tab, R2 1.75U Backspace) are also supported.

Novelties explainer:

The main novelty that repeats in the accent colors is the symbol of chaos.

The concepts of ordered and disordered systems are two commonly studied and connected topics within chaos theory that I wanted to represent artistically in the novelties. In the paired columns of novelties, the symbol of chaos and the symbol of extropy (the extent of a living or organizational system's capacity and drive for improvement and growth) are featured. Continuing down from R2-R4, two columns of novelties depict fundamental shapes (hexagon, square, triangle, and circle/spiral) in ordered and disordered forms.

The ISO enter novelty is an abstract rendition of the nautilus shell/logarithmic spiral motif (for anyone interested in what exactly the spiral ratio is, I recommend reading this and this).

Two R4 1.25U and 1.50U text novelties commemorate famous scientists who have contributed significantly to the field of chaos theory.

Candykeys has guaranteed that this kit will be made.

Renders

618 by Zepsody

Void by MISFIT

Pulsar by Zepsody

Other

Deskpads

Minimal shapes deskpad

Butterfly effect deskpad by Tabijey

Metal Artisan by Keylabs Crucible

Aluminum base anodized to match the modifiers dark purple and randomly infilled with a combination of two of the pink, green, purple, yellow, and red accent colors from the set.

There are 20 possible combinations, please forgive the lack of static renders.

Metal Artisan by HIBI

Brass base with colorful PVD coating and a luminous glow enamel fill.

This design is a depiction of the Lorenz attractor butterfly motif.

Static angles:

Singularity switches

More information:

Switch specs:
Manufacturer is Tecsee
Rainbow aluminum-plated full nylon housings
Linear long pole POM stem (3.4mm travel) color matched to the pink accent of GMK Chaos Theory
68g 15mm standard gold springs
Each switch's rainbow metal plating will be different and appear differently.

These will be reviewed by Sampakpak and Shoobs sometime in October, so look out for that!

This specific colorway of Tecsee's metal plated switches will only run for the GMK Chaos Theory GB and will not be made again.

EVERY SWITCH WILL LOOK DIFFERENT AS A CONSEQUENCE OF THE PLATING PROCESS
please open up the second more tab to see the variance:

Space Cables Collaboration

Artisans collaborations

Archetype
Dreadkeys
Winkeys
GooeyKeys
DestroyerCaps
SodieCaps
PiterKiwi Keycaps
Keylabs
SludgeKidd
TinyMakesThings
PrimeCaps
LividityCaps

American Haptics - workmat

I am welcome to any other makers, please just message me on discord!

Easily answered questions

1) Will the metal switches be expensive?

They will be on the higher end of switch prices because the aluminum plating process is very expensive as is, but I have fronted the injection molding cost myself and will be making zero profit off of these. The vendors will be running these at largely break-even costs with profits from the caps sales helping to offset any losses. So these will be as affordable as physically possible.

2) Numpad is separate again, why?

With this as well, I wanted to put as much compatibility into the base kit as possible while keeping the price around the $110-$115USD price range, which I could not achieve with numpad in the base kit.

Hence, I broke out numpad into a child kit. I will not be taking profit from the numpad kit, so it will be slightly cheaper than usual for this reason. I hope this helps.

3) There are so many colors, won't that make colormatching take a long time?

I totally understand this concern with GMK sets particularly.

In order to mitigate the time required for colormatching and to help with the precision of these colors, all colors for this set are Pantone-referenced colors and four out of the seven of them have previously been color matched by GMK for other sets (deltaE values below 3). I thankfully have permission to use these references.

While there are a few more factors to consider with colormatching such as the stock color of the sourced plastic used differing from batch to batch, having pre-colormatched samples should certainly help in the long run.

4) Why only backwards alphas and not everything else?

That was not financially feasible in just this single project. So we split this project up into two parts, this first part accomplishes getting molds for the alphas and a follow-up project (GMK Pure Chaos) will accomplish getting molds for the modifiers (yes, I will only be doing this for backwards icon mods as of now).

5) This looks like GMK _________, where's the comparison?

Color comparisons are on the way for all the sets that people have shown interest in seeing comparisons for (Cojiro, 8008, Future Funk, Olivia, and Moondust).

6) Did you consider taking a more mathematical approach to the novelties?

I definitely did, I actually spent two months studying chaos theory out of personal interest.

I tried initially to depict things like the Mandelbrot set, a bifurcation plot, or a strange attractor in the novelties, but it became difficult due to the expanding nature of these figures. Something else I considered was featuring some key equations on novelties but I did not like the look of writing out complex equations on a keycap, not to mention that most of them did not fit within the length of the cap unless the print was extremely fine, which became visually very unbalanced and hard to read (something that dye sublimation would not have helped).

It became increasingly apparent the more that I tried that it would be simpler and classier to pay homage to some of the famous scientists by featuring their names as text novelties (permitting that their names fit the length of the caps).

I made a metal artisan design of a Lorenz attractor that I may run separately as it wasn't possible to fit it into this groupbuy. We will see.

7) Why did you decide to go with doubleshot for this project as opposed to dye sublimation?

If CRP was an option, I would be throwing this project at them without hesitation.

However, with the currently accessible manufacturers for dye-sublimated PBT keycaps, I was worried about some of the colors and novelties of this set not being achieved as precisely as I would like. While the dye-sublimation restrictions for novelties designs would have allowed more detailed iconography, ink bleed and legend crispness remains a major concern with this manufacturing process.

GMK colormatching is not perfect. But, for saturated colors like the ones I have chosen, it has a better shot of achieving them than dye-sublimation does.

If you have any more questions, please join my server and I would be more than happy to answer your questions!

Credits

Pikku-allu
Ray (rkristia)
ZTMD
Everyone in my discord server

Thank you for your support. Please join my discord for updates on this set and artisan collaborations!