DSA Discovery (original IC)

Hey guys,

I just wanted to quickly share what I did a few months ago but never got around to finish. It's missing a lot of things such as uniformly themed novelty keys, different kits, and so on. But I think the idea is cool and I should just share it for getting feedback and continue working on it maybe.

DSA Discovery is meant to be a dye sublimated DSA keyset, reminiscent of the white/grey/black/red exterior and interior designs of well known space crafts such as NASA space shuttles. In particular, I wanted it to feature Eurostile for the legends since it's a very distinct font used in many great science fiction movies. And I wanted it to be somewhat novel in terms of the general design, not just the colors.

Originally, it was supposed to be dark grey set with light legends. Unfortunately, just making the font molds for the legends is so expensive that this is not an option (as most of you may know, there is already a project for that, led by CQ_Cumbers, which didn't make any progress for quite a while now). So I focused on dye sublimation on bright base colors which led to quite a few new ideas. I experimented with subtle patterns, different shades of grey on the same key and adding different shapes uniformly to all keys, among other things. Here comes the base idea:

Light variant



Dark variant



As you can see, the distinct feature is the dark grey stripe at the bottom edge of each key. The mods have thicker ones with inverted legends to spice it up a little and to provide room for providing additional graphics in the main area of the key. It started out without the inverted legends but it looked very much like Granite, despite the different font, imho. Just for reference, here is a picture (not a favoring it, tbh):



3D renders

Just to see how this would roughly look. I don't have models for the modifiers so here is just a 1U ESC example:





Kerning is a bit off. Would fix that in the final stages.

Is that kind of print even possible?

Still unclear on that. I contacted SP and they replied that an edge-to-edge print is certainly possible. However, the tolerance space is 0.020 inches. As the design emphasizes the edges (and the inverted mods are even closer to them), it might be the case that even smallest deviations would kill the look (my assumption). I will try to get a sample and decide from there on.

Mod extensions

With the light and dark variant I was quite happy so I was starting to look into making this set more unique. I tried different things for the mods, like providing a sutble background pattern (doable using dye sub as far as I know), or adding additional horizontal bars:





Novelty ideas

The extended mod designs were okay-ish but what I actually wanted was novelty keys that really distinguish the set from others. So I started to play with just very simple but bold geometric shapes for the mods:



Or these ones, inspired by the movie "Moon":



Or these ones which are much finer and colorful (kind of reminds me of WipeOut):



What do you think?

This is all I have sitting around for months now. As I said, I feel that I struggle badly with the novelties and other things turned up in life so I had to put this on ice. Anyhow, I needed to get this off my chest and see if there is any interest in me pursuing this any further. All feedback is welcome. Ideas for novelties -- please shoot

Thanks for checking it out!

Updates
October 10: Added a couple of 3D renders for 1U key and added info from SP
October 7: Typos