Ryan Norbauer has been deep in the keyboard community for over a decade. First creating keysets in the early days of GeekHack, he moved on to become the pre-eminent maker of aftermarket housings for Topre keyboards. His designs, some which fetch nearly $4000 for exotic materials and finishes, have long waitlists and often sell out within hours. And if you’ve ever been to a meetup and talked to the enthusiasts who bring Norbauer boards to show off, you know what a passionate and loyal fanbase exists around his work.
Ryan recently caught a lot of attention within the Cherry MX world too with his talk on a radical new solution to the stabilizer problem at KeyCon 2024, and today NovelKeys is proud to be stocking two of his creations that we feel will be interesting to folks who may not already be tuned into the Topresphere. The first is R&D 1973 keycap set in GMK’s MTNU profile. The second is the Spacedock, a high-end terrazzo display stand for your most prized keyboards. Both match Norbauer’s retrofuturist designs.
Ryan is known for his quirky and often amusing shop newsletters and for just being a brainy and interesting guy to talk to. So, to introduce him to our community, we thought we’d share an extended email interview exploring his background and work in the keyboard community.
We talk about how his work in keyboards grew out of existential despair, his plans for the new Norbauer-type stabilizer technology, design inspirations, and more.
Interview
NovelKeys: From my own experience, along with some other vendors I have become friends with, we all sort of just fell into the keyboard space by accident. We didnt seek out keyboard degrees, but by chance got into it. Why do you run a keyboard company?
Norbauer: Well, I don’t really think of my keyboard work as being primarily a business but rather a kind for medium for exploring certain creative ideas. Admittedly, I make devices for punching numbers and letters into your computer, so to suggest that it is an “artistic” activity may be a little grandiose, but nevertheless that is how it often feels to me. And, so I think the honest answer to your question is the same for me as it would be for many actual artists: it is simply a way to combat my own existential despair and the disappointments of everyday life—to carve a modest little pattern of beauty into a world that oftentimes feels dreary and transactional.
You have quite the resume, and I am always stunned learning more about what you have done in the past. Your bio says you worked at NASA, the CDC, and the British Parliament and founded/sold multiple tech companies before this one. I’m curious how you got from that to keyboards.
Heh. Yeah, Norbauer & Co. is actually the byproduct of a failed attempt at being retired. It was in the early 2010s, and I had sold the last of my three startups. I had spent much of my life up to that point very focused on on-paper achievements in the realms of academia and business. But I gradually come to the realization that collecting fancy-sounding resume bullet points didn’t really move the needle for me in terms of contentment in life. (When you’re young and before you’ve experienced things that seem remote and exciting, it’s easy to believe that they’ll somehow fundamentally change life—and it’s kind of heartbreaking when the imagined best-case-scenario arrives and absolutely nothing about the subjective experience of life changes.) Deprived of those delusions and suddenly with a terrifyingly unbounded expanse of free time before me, I stumbled—predictably, but blindly—into a sort of crisis of meaning and purpose
This began with my spending about year as a depressed puddle on the floor, but I eventually found my mind turning—purely as a distraction—to forgotten enthusiasms of my youth: particularly late 20th-century science fiction and the related culture of utopian optimism around the future of technology that prevailed in that era. These ideas for some reason have always deeply resonated with me and are probably my greatest enthusiasm in life. So, in looking for (what I have subsequently come to call) mortality-distraction projects, it was a natural place to start.
I started out making highly-accurate replicas of props from vintage science fiction (which, incidentally, led to a fun side gig creating officially licensed high-end Star Trek prop replicas). This required essentially—and unintentionally—giving myself an education in industrial design: CAD modeling, CNC machining, metalwork, paint and surface finishing, resin casting, etc.
I then realized that those skills could be applied to the other of my lifelong passions: keyboards. Vintage keyboards (which were almost always what we have now come to think of as “mechanical”) have always nostalgically reminded me of the computers I had learned to program as a kid starting in the late 80s—back when optimistic futurism and the techno-utopianism around computing were nearing their zenith. So, they’re deeply sentimental “retrofuturist” objects for me—and why I always feel these two hobbies to be interrelated.
Mind you, the keyboard work was all just for fun. But to help cover the costs of my aftermarket housing projects, I started offering some of the designs to my fellow nerds on GeekHack. As they started getting into the hands of my fellow nerds around the world, however, things just somehow snowballed into a business without my quite intending, or even wanting, them to. (I had sworn off starting a business ever again when I sold my third one.) From the very first group buy, though, I was never able to keep up with the demands of the community for me to make more, both in terms of quantity and an expanded product line (such as the years-long request for me to make an HHKB housing).
Anyway, now here we are in 2024, and (despite my seemingly best efforts to undermine the business) I’ve inexplicably made and shipped millions of dollars of these insanely nerdy objects to passionate clients across the planet—literally from Argentina to Mongolia. It’s a weird but fun world, and despite my being sort of dragged kicking and screaming into it, it turns out to be the first “job” I’ve ever found truly creatively satisfying.
Do you have any designers that particularly inspire you?
Rather than individual designers per se, I’m actually generally more inspired by people who might be called (to use a slightly pompous term) “creative visionaries”—people like Walt Disney, Gene Roddenberry, Steve Jobs, George Lucas. These were all people who were deeply interested in technology and commerce—and specifically how those things could be used to help people escape the cares of everyday life into a different and more beautiful imaginative world. And each of them, in his own way, pushed the boundaries of the possible to achieve these goals. I really respect people who can inhabit the intersection of engineering, art, and commerce—and actually leverage those things together to create something lovely that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
But, just purely in terms of aesthetics, I really do like the work of midcentury modern architects like Edward Durell Stone and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, for example—and pretty much every building in Palm Springs. I also think Epcot Center in Florida (or at least what’s left of the original park) is the perfect expression of 1980s futurism, along with the work of Rich Sternbach the illustrator who created the distinctively “soft” industrial design futurism shown in Star Trek: The Next Generation. For a more 70s vibe, Ralph McQuarrie’s early concept art for Star Wars is also amazing. Looking at any of these things always fills me with a profound desire to go out and make beautiful things that feel like they could fit into the alternate-reality future that they portray.
A lot of people who run keyboard companies seem to burn out quickly, either through the pressures of business or the stress of dealing with trolls and what can be a very critical online community. The “loud minority of negativity” is actually one of the main themes that kept coming up during the designers panel at KeyCon. As someone who has been working in this area for longer than most companies in the enthusiast keyboard space have existed, do you have any advice for aspiring designers or entrepreneurs?
I think my longevity in keyboards stems largely from the creative freedom I’ve given myself not to take things too seriously. And, in fact, I think this is one of the things that makes the keyboard community in general more pleasant than many enthusiast communities (a tiny number of snarky internet jerks notwithstanding). You would expect a community organized around expensive physical products would be very pretentious and gatekeepey, but happily that turns out not to be the case for keyboards. And I think that this is mainly because we can’t take ourselves overly seriously because we know most of the normies on earth would think of our obsession as extremely silly and trivial (not that they would be wrong).
Since I’ve always considered Norbauer & Co. a kind of fun “retirement project,” I have 1) been able to focus more on big long-term creative goals rather than short-term revenue and, relatedly 2) have always paid approximately zero attention to what people say online, both about my work specifically and keyboards more broadly.
So, I don’t know, you asked for advice, and I guess it might be to keep your day job as long as you can. This will allow you to pay attention to your own internal creative compass rather than what might seem like the short-term pressures of the market. If you do that authentically and are actually making good stuff, everything else will probably follow. But I won’t pretend it doesn’t take a lot of patience, appetite for personal financial risk, and willingness to deal with logistical minutiae. In short, if you’re primarily interested in making money quickly, I’d say: do pretty much anything else than sell keyboards. But if, like me, you just really love this stuff and would happily do it all for free, it can be enormously satisfying to connect with other people who share and are willing to support your passion.
Just remember there will always be non-contributing zeroes who have nothing better than to type unhelpful things into comment boxes on the internet. But deploy your imagination to visualize the kind of human you’d have to be to spend your time like that, and suddenly you’ll find yourself worrying about their opinions a lot less. The insidious selection bias of internet commentary also means this kind of thing will also give you a very inaccurate view of what most people actually think of your work. In my experience, the people who adore your stuff will just silently type their credit card numbers into your Shopify store and enjoy it when it arrives. Very occasionally they’ll send you private note later saying how much they like what you do. These are the people who matter—and whom your work exists to serve. Pay attention to these happy fellow travelers and ignore everything else.
In your talk at KeyCon, you mentioned a new “ready to type” keyboard called the Seneca coming later this year. Can you tell us more about that?
Sure. The basic premise is simple: to explore what it would look like to create my purest expression of the “perfect” typing experience (or at least my very subjective expression of that, as someone coming from the capacitive world). Since I have historically focused on aftermarket housings for third-party boards, I have been creatively constrained by what those companies deign to make and thus have been limited in that expression until now.
The Seneca is my ground-up design that arrives ready to plug in and use, and relies on no third party components. The design philosophy was just: spare no expense and make it as good as the laws of physics will allow. The result is a totally unhinged product liberated from any excessive concern with marketability or economic practicality. (It’ll start at like $3400.) Bonkers, maybe. But that’s kind of my schtick; it’s a thing that wouldn’t exist if I weren’t doing it, so that’s enough for me.
This has meant completely re-engineering everything about what most people think of a capacitive keyboard, such that every component of the Seneca—from screws to stabilizers—is completely bespoke and the product of years of first-principles engineering, experimentation, and design. It has been a very, very long road to get here but we’re nearly ready for an initial limited “Edition 0” release offering in the coming few months for our most loyal existing clients, just to test the waters, and then we’ll likely see a slightly wider release later this year.
If folks want to sign up to be notified when it becomes available, they can do so on the Seneca product page now. FWIW, I’ll also continue to write on my personal newsletter/blog about the all the work that went into development process, such as my rather long recent article on stabilizer design (on which my Keycon talk was based).
Speaking of which, as I know I am not the only one curious, do you think you’d ever be willing to make the Norbauer-type stabilizers available as a kit for MX builders?
It’s something we’ve talked about, and in fact the test fixtures I showed at KeyCon (comparing our stabilizers to rattly stock ones) were using Cherry MX Red switches. To achieve MX compatibility only a different wire size and differently designed pair of injection-molded housings is required. We’ve done this in test molds but haven’t yet prepared hard tooling, because we’re very focused on getting the Seneca as perfect as possible first.
Unfortunately, if we ever do it, they’ll be very expensive to produce. To say nothing of the development costs that ran well into the six figures, each set of stabilizers is like a piece of intricate watch work that takes a long time to assemble and isn’t something we could reasonably ask end users to do themselves (due to the small precision pin joints, it is difficult to do without magnification, even if you know what you’re doing).
One of the first things we ever connected on was that you were originally from a small town here in West Virginia just a few miles from the NovelKeys office. Do you think there is something in the water here in West Virginia that makes people want to get into the keyboard business?
I know you’re partly joking, but I actually think maybe it’s not totally a coincidence. I think a big reason I was so involved in technology and the early internet at a young age was growing up in the rather culturally (and just physically/geographically) isolated environment of West Virginia. You grow up watching movies and TV and reading about what seems like a very interesting and exciting life that is always elsewhere, and you come to yearn for connection to the outside world.
Computing and the internet were that connection for me and I’m quite certain this strong emotional resonance (and dreams of a future where this interconnectivity would transform the world for the better) is why I’ve always been so drawn to keyboards. As I often like to say, keyboards are our literal, physical connection to the rest of the world, so it doesn’t surprise me that people who live in more isolated parts of the world might find them more compelling. Or that’s my crackpot hypothesis anyway. 😊 And that feeling is something that has stayed with me all my life; I love keyboards just as much now as when I was 12.
For more info on Ryan’s work, check out Norbauer & Co., and for more a detailed conversation, this long-form video interview with him by Taeha Types.