High-Profile Ruins the User Experience

CNC’d keyboards from respected designers aim to achieve 7mm-8mm above the keyboard plate for a High-Profile design; most have told me they prefer to use a bezel height of 7.5mm.

If you’re using Cherry or DSA keycaps, a 9mm bezel height will interfere with how you bottom out on the bottom-row of your keyboard — which hinders your overall typing experience. When your thumb presses the bottom row, because the way our hands are angled, you’ll end up touching the edge of the case before you’ll be able to fully bottom-out a switch. The extra 1.5mm ends up feeling really awkward and changes the way you type.

By specification, 6.5mm is enough, but due to parallax you can still see the switches. The best “plate-to-keycap-bottom” distance is between 7mm - 7.5mm.

I’ve tried using 3x 3mm above the plate for several of my designs, but end up getting frustrated at how unpleasant the experiences feels compared to a 6mm or 7.5mm. Besides the purely aesthetic appeal, I’m really discouraged to produce 9mm designs because they arn’t that great to use.

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