Introducing Bees.Keys, designer duo behind DCD Hundred Acres

Drop+MechKeys

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Jun 25, 2024783 VIEWS

With the launch of DCD Hundred Acres imminently on the horizon, we wanted to introduce the designers of this fantastic set to the Drop community! Welcome Bees.Keys, and thank you both for so generously giving us your time to chat about yourselves, your process, and the Hundred Acres keycap set! For those unfamiliar, Bees.Keys is a team made up of Beesley and Cthalupa - both fantastic designers and a joy to speak with. Without further ado, let's get things started!

Tell us a bit about yourself and your history - relevant to mech keys or not. Where are you from, what is your “day job”, what are your other hobbies and interests aside from keyboards? [Beesley] I’m from the UK, and my day job is producing marketing renders for mechanical keyboards and keycaps. I have always had a passion for CGI since I was kid, getting a subscription to 3D World magazine for my 10th birthday. Other hobbies? What are other hobbies? I’m lucky enough to enjoy doing something for work so much that it also occupies my free time, learning new techniques and software to bring my work to the next level. I think my fiance wishes I would do something other than CGI & designing keycaps in my spare time though! [Cthalupa] I've worked in the IT industry for about two decades now, spending significant time working with Linux, various virtualization technologies, networking, and more recently, cloud computing. Outside of work, I've been hooked on anime and video games since the 90s, and also love music - mostly various types of metal. I try to play guitar (it generally goes poorly), and I also like to chuck polyhedral dice around - tabletop RPGs are my primary form of in-person social interaction with my friends. What brought you to the world of mechanical keyboards? Was there a particular origin event, or did you stumble across it gradually? [Beesley] I think this is a common answer, Covid. I got put on furlough while working at an Architecture Firm producing marketing CGIs and images for planning applications. While mindlessly going through YouTube, I found that classic TaehaTypes video on keyboard stabilizers. At the time I couldn’t afford these amazing keyboards everyone was sharing pictures of on Reddit, so I decided to render what I couldn’t have and post it for fun. It remains one of my most popular and upvoted reddit posts to this day. I know we’d all appreciate a peek at a designer’s workspace. Could you share your current keyboard/desk setup? Photos appreciated but not required. [Beesley] I won’t lie, I tidied my desk for this. 90% is stuff everywhere, keycaps samples, pantone books, empty glasses, you name it. It is pure chaos. I haven’t swapped from using the OGR since It got delivered. I have honestly struggled to find a typing experience even close to this keyboard.

[Cthalupa] I'm a bit of a hoarder, so I've amassed a pretty large collection of keyboards that I rotate through frequently. Last week it was the DriftMechanics Austin with GMK Frost Witch. This week it's a Trailblazer Avalon with GMK Harvest. Similar to Beesley, my desk is chaos - when I move or replace my desk, the first few weeks are pristine, organized, and with perfectly managed cables. By the end of the second month it's fallen into disarray, and I won't even lie to you and say it's an organized chaos - I have no idea where things are most of the time. I think the most "designer" focused aspect of my desk is a color matching overhead light with very high CRI (Color rendering index - how accurately the light reproduces color vs. natural light), and particularly R9 CRI, which is a band of the red spectrum that even many high CRI lights struggle with. Given your day job (we already knew this before asking ;) ) and the skills honed there, was it a relatively easy transition to designing in the keyboard space? I imagine the rendering was easy enough to figure out. Were there unexpected challenges with translating designs and ideas to keycaps as a medium? [Beesley] The joke I like to tell about this transition is that I have essentially moved from rendering rectangles with holes cut in them for windows, to rectangles with boxes on them for keycaps. The biggest challenge I faced was scale. After a decade of working on Architecture it got ingrained in my mind that i'm working on huge scale projects, then I would take a step back and realize my proportions are all wrong for this 18.9mm keycap! Was Chinchillin (cute name, btw) your first design idea, or just the first to make it through to IC? Would you ever hope to revisit that design with your current level of experience? Are there any other previous design ideas that you want to take another look at? [Beesley] Oh dear Chinchillin. My first failure, also my first idea for a keycap set! I learned a lot from this project, and I do believe my main issue was the time it launched. Right at the crash of GBs from Covid, when wait times started to grow longer and longer. This set has actually just undergone a redesigning for Cherry, who knows, maybe this will see the light of day sometime soon. Art Deco is a previous design I have been taking another look at lately. Currently going through a redesign to hopefully bring that to reality. I’m a huge fan of the Art Deco style and want to make this design a reality, mostly for myself!

Editor's note: Design has since changed

Which of your own keyboard-related designs/projects are you the most proud of? [Beesley] Hundred Acres. Even with all the issues, I’m still the most proud of this project. Myself and Cthalupa worked hard on this design, to keep faithful to the original art and we were so excited that everyone else had the same attachment to the project that we shared.
What is your process for gathering your potential ideas? How do you pare those down to workable concepts that you move forward with and take to the community? Could you share a bit about what goes into those decisions? [Beesley] I’ll let Cthalupa answer this one for the both of us! [Cthalupa] The initial ideation is pretty much all a "feel" thing - I pretty much never start with a colorway, but instead some other sort of concept. It might be a specific theme, like Hundred Acres, or it might be something more abstract - ZX was initially conceived based on the desire for an R0-R5 set. For more concrete themes, it's then about trying to find a colorway that matches the identity. For the more abstract ones, it's about trying to find something that evokes a similar sort of internal reaction - R0-R5 sets being more common towards the early days of the keyboard hobby struck a chord with us when thinking of the ZX Sinclair as being from the early days of compute, and then we took off running. Since I work almost exclusively with Beesley, the whole process is heavy on communication and shouting out ideas as they come up, especially in the early stages - we'll get excited and spend half a day on a call fleshing out the preliminary idea. As for how we decide to move forward - if both of us are feeling good about where the design is, we're pretty quick to show it to the community and gauge interest. We're not ones to sit on a project because we're worried it's not polished to perfection. Feedback helps us iterate and improve the project! What is your favorite design of someone else’s? Either in terms of pure execution, or “I wish I had thought of that idea”? [Beesley] DCD WLK-MN, this is such a fun design! I grew up as tapes started to fade out and be replaced by CD’s but they still hold a special place in my heart. Nostalgia is a strong emotion. [Cthalupa] On the keycap side, there's a handful of designers who just consistently put out excellent work that make me wish I had their talent. SpikedSynapse and afresh put out one of my favorite sets of all time in GMK Terror Below, and I own every keycap set Bachoo has run. What is a concept or idea that you’ve had, but have been unable to create (whether for technical reasons, licensing, etc)? TableTop. I played around with a design with SpikedSynapse after Chinchillin to bring a classic tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons, to a keycap set. It turned into a huge project with multiple novelty kits and started to become overwhelming. We both got side tracked into other projects and never completed it. Maybe one day it will be something to revisit, with official licensing. How many different iterations or rounds of revisions does a design typically go through before being finalized? Could you share some early-stage work in progress designs with us, whether for past or future projects? [Beesley] Not as many as you might think. Cthalupa and myself will sit in a call for a couple of hours narrowing down the base colors, for an idea we have had, we might go through 5-10 combinations before we settle on something we like and will then refine from there deciding on Pantone, RAL or stock colors to use. Once we have that I will go away and draw novelties, I often already have an idea of exactly what novelties I want in my head. Hundred Acres was a 1 and done situation with the novelty designs (apart from removing the red shirt due to that not being in public domain.). They aren’t always this easy though, Art Deco has multiple iterations for the custom modifier legends that took well over a month to develop. What software/hardware setup do you use to create your designs? For rendering I use 3DS Max, Redshift & Tyflow. I’m one of the few that doesn’t use Blender, purely due to the fact I have used 3DS for the past decade and I am extremely familiar with it and don’t have the time to learn Blender. Pairing this with a 5950x, 128GB RAM and 2* RTX 3090s. For all my 2D stuff I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. Do you have any designs in the works that you could tease or cryptically allude to here? [Beesley] I personally have been working on a project with a streamer PirateSoftware, for the game he has been developing called HeartBound. As for Cthalupa and myself, we have another project that we did just pitch to Drop. However it does require licensing for a certain MMO, and no, it’s not World of Warcraft.

What drew you to Winnie-the-Pooh as inspiration? Has it always been a part of your life to some degree? I grew up with Winnie-the-Pooh so it will always have a place in my heart. The main draw was nostalgia, we all love to look back on when times were simpler. What was more simple than being a kid? Hundred Acres clearly draws from the original Pooh source material, in part because that is what was opened up after the copyright lapsed. Do you ever hope to revisit it with more modern iterations of the characters, or are the originals the preferred versions for your vision? I would love to revisit the source material with the more modern designs! So Disney if you are reading this, reach out! I have seen those $5 keycaps you have put out and we can do better! Is there an official “Hundred Acre Wood” typeface, or were the legends designed from scratch for the set? Ermmm, there is no official typeface for Hundred Acre Wood. The font used is actually Patrick Hand from Google Fonts! We just wanted something that felt handwritten, and a little inconsistent. Taking inspiration from the map where it is all hand written by Christopher Robin. What’s next for Bees.Keys? This can be related to keyboards or not - share whatever you’re working on lately. :) More designs! We have lots of plans and designs we want to bring out. Keep an eye out for what we have next!

And that's it! This one is a little longer than normal (squeezing what would normally be split into two parts into a single story) - thanks for sticking around to the end. :) Thank you once again to Beesley and Cthalupa for your wonderful answers! Who is your favorite Winnie-the-Pooh character?

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Jun 27, 2024

This is such a great read! I can't wait to see what you two come up with in the future. MMO-themed and D&D-themed keycaps eh? 👀