4Game

I'm toying with the idea of designing a custom keyboard for elite dangerous, with keyboard legends indicating the key functions.

I link a sketch in this post.

The main things holding me back (or rather, delaying the inevitable), is that I need to decide on a design first, and my limited skills in various areas.

The areas of my limited skills, include but are not restricted to

– picking appropriate legend texts

– picking appropriate fonts

– picking an appropriate design/layout of the labels, their placing, spacing, sizing.

– picking (in-)appropriate color schemes and keys to use them on.

This link is an html/css sketch to test out labels and look:

http://xok.dk:82/other/elite_keys/aitch/ait1.html

In order of importance, I need to figure out:

– some good/relevant text labels. On the one hand, keys have limited room for labels, so anything more than two short words ("Caps Lock", "Print Screen"..), is seemingly a bad idea. The other direction for the labels, would be labels/styles used in actual cockpits, assuming people more clever and professional than me, have already done this design before..

– a reasonable way of placing them; currently I'm inclinded towards a single label centered along the top, and a primary 'normal' keyboard legend centered or below it ( the label for Q W E R T Y..). However, I'm open to actually leaving out the 'known' legend, and having only the ED label for keys in use.

– for colour scheme, currently I'm considering 3-4 theme colors: One for maneuvering, (ie the nine-ish thrust keys). One for panels , i.e. the keys 1-4. One for remaining ED-active keys, and a final color for non-ED keys (e.g. the function keys, and I,K,B).

(1) I am aware that you can remap your keys in ED at will, but I am willing to ignore that.

(2) (you can do/order custom keyboards with e.g. wasdkeyboards.com, and I have done so a couple of times.)

(3) I am aware some single keys in ED are multi-mapped up to 7 times. I prioritise a primary use label, but I'm not closed off to e.g. 4 labels, one in each corner.