At the beginning of 2024, I looked at my Splatoon 3 OLED Switch, looked at my keyboard and an idea popped into my head: Why don’t I design a matching keycap set? This idea sparked a very long journey making it become a reality. I did struggle coming up with the name as the nature of the IP meant my options were quite limited and the options I came up with weren’t great so I asked my Splatoon friends and one of them suggested KAM Soda Squid which ended up being the final name.

Because of my background in graphic designer, I just used Adobe Illustrator, a program I’m really comfortable in, to create the novelties and the final marketing files. I did have to learn how to use Blender, however, ImperfectLink made a Keyboard Render Kit which made my job significantly easier as it was a simple drag and drop for the keyboards and keycaps with the correct models. All I needed to do was update the colours, put the novelties in and set up the scene.

To be honest, it was a lot of Discord DMs between Keyreative the manufacturer and all the vendors. Being really on top of communications and having things as organised as possible for the vendors really helped get everyone on the same page and keep things moving forward which was my main goal.

I had always envisioned Soda Squid to be in a uniform profile and one of the uniform profiles I've used personally was KAM. I love the fact that uniform profiles allow the owner to get really creative with novelty placements.

There’s heaps of things I would change! I would love to do a GMK cherry profile set and it would definitely be something that doesn’t require such stringent colour-matching. But I would definitely still do a photoshoot at the end of the project as it was a nice way to end the project.

The main goal of KAM Soda Squid was to get the colours as close to the real Splatoon 3 Switch and after the first couple samples of PBT, it was very clear that it was not going to cut it (surprisingly, the fluro yellow was fine. It was the other colours that required a lot of work). Luckily I learnt that Keyreative had a new hybrid material for their KAM doubleshot keycaps and they were more than happy to make KAM Soda Squid doubleshot!

There were a lot to be honest but the most difficult moment that’s not really talked about was the colour-matching process. Because it’s a set that is inspired by a physical item, I really wanted to get the colours as close as possible to the inspiration. However, this meant multiple rounds of colour-matching. I initially used Pantone swatch books as that’s what I was most familiar with but once the samples didn’t come back the greatest, I switched over to Pantone plastic chips instead (which took way too long to arrive). But after another round of samples, I was really seeing the limitations of PBT. Once I switched over to their hybrid blend, and gave Keyreative a dupe of the Splatoon Switch Joycons for reference, there was a lot of progress and we finally arrived at the approved samples 7 months after colour-matching begun.

While it was one of the most challenging parts of the process, I’m really proud of how close the keycaps ended up being to the original Switch. It’s basically a 100% match in most lighting conditions which made the long colour-matching process very worth it.