Matt3o
Behind every successful keycap kit design there is a unique story and a passionate person to bring this idea into a real product.
Learn more about our exceptional design partners:
| Name: | Matteo Spinelli |
| Alias: | Matt3o |
| Location: | Florence, Italy |
| Creating since: | 2012 |
| About Me: | mechanical keyboards enthusiast before it was cool. All around nert, tinkerer, maker, sci-fi and fantysy addict. I build keycaps, keyboards, 3D printers and I code generative AI. |
| Plattforms: |
Designed GMK Sets.
My Keycap Designs….
About Me.
It was around summer of 2011 that I started developing a wrist and thumb pain caused by the long coding hours. At the time I was using a low profile Apple keyboard and little I knew about the mechanical keyboard world.
What I knew was that if I wanted to keep doing my job as a developer I had to solve my posture problem before the pain turned chronic, so I started lurking around the rather small at the time MK community. Eventually I ended up buying a tenkeyless Filco Majestouch but I very quickly realized that it wasn’t doing much for my wrist pain so I decided to build my own keyboard.
There was very little documentation so it took me quite some time but ultimately I had my first 65% hand-wired: it was the glorious Brownfox. The next logical step was to make it available to the community, so I started talking with Drop first (at the time Massdrop) and Input:Club later and we partnered to make 65% keyboards widely available to the western market.
That's how the whitefox was born, basically the keyboard that kickstarted the 65% mania.
Around 2014 Topre released The RealForce HiPro with beautiful high profile keycaps... and I knew something was missing in my life. It took me a while but in 2015 I started working on a new High Profile Spherical Top keycap directly inspired by IBM beamspring keyboards.
The market was growing fast but we were nowhere near the critical mass we are seeing today. Manufacturing a completely new profile was no easy task, Chinese factories were not very experienced in the process and the road was bumpy. In 2018, after three years from the initial concept with the patronage of Drop, we finally released MT3!
With MT3 I wanted to push that nostalgia button and I tried my best to make it as ergonomic as a high-profile could be but I understand that it is not for everybody.
MTNU was born.
I wanted a spherical top keycap that could be a valid alternative to a cylindrical. What would a “cherry profile” look like if it were spherical? That’s how MTNU (pronounced MTNew) began.
I gathered quite some feedback from MT3 users over the years and the main concerns are: 1) too tall, 2) edges too sharp. So I started from there.
The hitting area has to be very comfortable and should not cause any harm to your feeble fingers. Back to the drawing board I ended up with a soft spherical scoop with a round top edge profile. The finger happily snugs into the keycap and doesn’t find any hard edge on the front and back, much like on a cylindrical keycap.
It turned out that GMK was developing a similar profile and seemed tragically unfruitful to compete, so we joined forces. I worked with many Chinese, Taiwanese and American manufacturers but nowhere I’ve seen the level of professionalism that I experienced at GMK.
So what’s the deal with MTNU?
The profile is meant as a medium height, general purpose, very pleasing to type on alternative to cherry. The spherical scoop is inviting but not too deep to cause a sharp edge and the curved top outline softens the hitting area even more. Your fingers don’t hit on anything when floating over the keyboard; that makes MTNU a kind of "advanced" profile as your only reference when touch typing are the homing keys (F and J).
MTNU still borrows the look of vintage keycaps and for that reason we decided to go with a "retro" font. The typeface is clearly inspired by old IBM and Radioshack keyboards but it has been designed from scratch to be a bit less... archaic. At first sight it might look like a DIN font, but then you notice a few defining characteristics, like the barred 0 (zero) or the old school A or the broken pipe.
MTNU is the coronation of over 10 years of experience in keyboards and keycaps, I hope you'll consider it for your next set.
