For Christmas last year, my buddy Jeff picked me up a sheet of keyboard stickers. I set it aside to do “someday”. Someday was last night.

Here are the stickers.

And here is the keyboard I decided to apply them to. A year or two ago I bought two or three cheap Dell machines off of Craigslist. The keyboards have been sitting out in the garage, waiting for a project like this to come along. See? Being a packrat pays off!

Applying the stickers was easier than I had anticipated. Each keyboard key is slightly concave, which made it easy to line up the sticker before mashing it down. The adhesive on the stickers allows you to slide them around a bit before pressing them down and applying them permanently. I came up with a two-handed approach that involved pressing down the surrounding keys, which then allowed me to use my thumbs and fingers to align the stickers on each key. The stickers are almost exactly the same shape as the top of a key, which means if you apply one incorrectly, you can easily peel it off and try again.

Not all keyboards are made the same, and the sheet of stickers compensates for this by supplying multiple stickers of different shapes. For example, there were at least three different space bar stickers of varying lengths and widths. If you have a really custom keyboard you might double check to make sure the stickers will meet your needs, but for 99% of keyboards out there, these should work.

Another concern I had was that the stickers would affect the feel of the keyboard. They do, in a way. On a few of the keys where I was slightly off-center, my fingers catch on the sides of the keys.

I can’t really speak to the longevity of the stickers yet, but so far they feel pretty good. I’ll let you know next year how they go. Oh, and the entire project took about an hour to complete.