Painted Keyboards to Ease the Mind

Sunday, July 15, 2001

After programming for ten years, I still needed to look at my fingers. I knew where all the keys were, I suppose, and I could type fairly quickly. Probably around 30-40 words per minute. One day I got fed up and decided to paint my keyboards. The first one used simple gray primer and was purely functional -- you can't see the letters or numbers.

The idea came from my friend Drew who had cut his keyboard in half and who told me that one night he realized that he could visualize the entire keyboard with his eyes closed.

It took about a week, and I had a full keyboard behind my back for reference, but I finally found all the keys. The circumflex characters were particularly difficult, although, with programming, you tend to learn those pretty quickly. After about two weeks, I was typing at least twice as fast.

I quickly got carried away. I switched to a Microsoft Natural keyboard and tried to add a touchpad just below the spacebar. The idea was to minimize reaching for the mouse, which was still attached, and to use the touchpad to switch between windows on the desktop. I still used the mouse for 3D manipulations, which I do quite frequently. Unfortunately, I never used the touchpad.

I tried to make a keyboard out of wood. I took apart one of the Microsoft Natural keyboards and used it as a stencil. I started with a block of redwood and used a power sander and router to carve away the keyboard. I was going to use the keys and mechanism from the disassembled keyboard inside the wood shell. This proved far too difficult a task, and I ended up breaking the piece of wood when I pressed down too hard on the belt sander.

When you work with a computer all day long, you are constantly baraged by letters, numbers and rigid geometric shapes. My feeling is that you need some sort of abstract art close at hand. A nicely painted keyboard both minimizes the number of symbols and patterns and replaces them with pleasing colors and shapes.

This one was made by my friend Carlos, a lighting animator and airbrush artist I work with at PDI. I generally make a new keyboard once every six months or so.