Electronic Materials Office is a new London startup inspired by the tactile-detailed consumer electronic designs of the likes of Teenage Engineering, Frog Design’s Hartmut Esslinger, and industrial design icon, Richard Sapper. Think “timeless functional simplicity” with a few subtle eye-catching details. The sum of those inspirations are to coalesce in the form of the startup’s first release, the Altar I, a minimalist, ultra-low profile mechanical keyboard sharing many of the same holistic hallmarks of design engineered to engage the senses.
German-born industrial designer Richard Sapper’s black and boxy aesthetic so closely associated with the IBM Thinkpad is very apparent in the Altar I’s mildly Sith Lord impression, right down to the deliberate striking em-dash of orange-red. But a closer look reveals an additional layer of playfulness, including a large typographic treatment across the span of the keyboard’s numeric keys, concave chiclet keys, and a boldly-hued rotary encoder knob that seems to beckon the fingertips for a turn.
Flip over the keyboard and the Altar I’s commitment to subtle minimalism theme is revealed.
The aforementioned work Sapper created for IBM has often been described as the yin to Apple’s yang, dark and boxy, and the Altar I could similarly be compared to Apple’s own Apple Magic Keyboard in their differing approach to creating similarly sleek wireless peripherals. But imagining the colors inversed, and it’s equally easy to envision the keyboard as a descendent of Hartmut Esslinger’s work for Frog Design and their prognostications of portable computing for Apple decades ago.
A USB-C charging cable delivers power to a 200mAh cell battery for wireless use via Bluetooth.
Each of the Altar I’s plastic pieces are made from post-consumer waste, an extension of Electronic Materials Office’s “sustainability is luxury” ethos, and one more directly communicated by the brand’s boldly direct mission statement: “The world is fucked unless we, collectively, do something about it.”
Altar I is estimated to begin shipping in autumn 2023, with pre-orders for both 77-key US and 78-key UK English layouts arriving before E.U. and World iterations are made available.
