After going through a successful group buy with IFK Strawberry Lemonade, the keycap designer Dazon took little time to regroup before ideas for a new set began to emerge. He began working on his next set the following year, originally called “Infinikevin,” he says, which was “an inside joke with some of my friends.” The project bloomed from there, gaining traction throughout many discord servers and friend groups. But days before the scheduled release of the IC, the file containing all of his hard work got irreversibly corrupted. “Every shred of motivation I had to work on the set went away,” Dazon says. Although at first he tried to recreate what had been there, the loss of his initial work caused him to withdraw from the project for a long time.
More recently, though, the pieces finally seemed to come back together, as he also redeveloped his initial designs for the Asthan language. “The first iteration of the language . . . was heavily, if not entirely, based on Kaktovik,” Dazon recounts, “a number system created by some kids in Kaktovik, Alaska.” Two years after that initial design, he went back to the drawing board to rework the system from the ground up. This time, he stuck to a “stricter grid to base them off of,” with “each number building on the last.”
“The rest of the language was pretty easy to come up with in the end,” Dazon continues, “and each symbol looks like it fits one overarching style rather than looking like some random lines.”
From the beginning, Dazon had known that he wanted to use a uniform profile. Although at first he considered DSA from Signature Plastics, a vendor with connections to the manufacturer was lost, and so Dazon looked to the newer KAM profile from Keyreative. At the time, KAM was fairly new, but the manufacturer had proven themselves to have high quality dye-sublimation methods, as many consumers seemed to be extremely pleased with their work. Now that more years have passed, Keyreative has shown to be a reliable manufacturer for KAT and KAM keycaps, and Dazon is extremely pleased with having chosen them.
The originality of both the Asthan language and unique modifiers makes this set stand out artistically, and speaks to the amount of thought put into this fabricated universe. “Nobody tells you how much work worldbuilding takes until you are knee deep in a 24-page Google doc . . . But the idea of an overarching story that people could discover on their own was so incredibly interesting to me, and so I kept on pushing through.” Dazon hopes to incorporate some of this lore into deskmat designs, as well as potential ARGs.
Dazon’s intentions with KAM Astha run much deeper than just designing a colorful keycap set. There is a world and a story just below the surface, and Dazon is finally inviting us in to come discover it.
Check out the IC page below:
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=122481.0
All article photos are from the KAM Astha Geekhack IC or Dazon directly.