From arcade cabinets to interface design
Marcin Wichary's route into design ran through the insides of machines. His father repaired arcade games and pinball machines, which meant free play in the arcades of the early and mid-nineties — and, more usefully, an open cabinet to poke at. Seeing an assembly and understanding that somebody had designed it is what hooked him.
Programming followed, then the discovery that what he actually did — getting distracted by fonts, colors, and rebuilt UI elements — had a name. Wichary describes himself as a designer carrying programming baggage, someone who entered the discipline backwards while the "should designers code" debate rolled on without a resolution.
Research as a way of working on modern products
Nostalgia is powerful and not always useful, Wichary says, so his interest in old machinery isn't a "they don't make them like it used to" argument. It's remixing: pulling what still makes sense out of the past, discarding the baggage, and revisiting what was abandoned too quickly. The Playdate handheld serves as his illustration — a deliberately dedicated device with a monochrome screen that also wants internet connectivity and a good metal body, negotiating with nostalgia rather than emulating it.
At Medium, that instinct produced the work on link underlines. The point wasn't reverence for a two-century-old typographic ideal so much as making links beautiful enough that people want to make more of them. In print you can't link outward; the web can, and Wichary cites John Siracusa's long-running Ars Technica reviews of Mac OS X as proof of how active reading changes when text is densely linked.
There's a cost to unbroken abundance, he suggests — a VHS store once forced a conversation with friends about what to watch, while a score on a review site ends the discussion. He extends the thought to social platforms: we were not built to be intimately connected to so many people, and the Dunbar number exists for a reason. The hopeful version is that small, curated sets of blogs, the Google Reader model, turn out to be the more human scale.
Keyboard shortcuts at Figma
Wichary joined Figma nearly five years ago as a designer, working on the first version of auto layout, typography features, selection colors, and a long tail of smaller pieces. He has since moved into management, helping other designers ship into the classic editor, and he has become the keyboard person there — unsurprising given everything else he does.
Figma is a modern web app with multiplayer, right-click menus, and desktop conventions, which makes it another negotiation with the past. The keyboard remains the best channel between a brain and the outside world if you want speed, so the question is where shortcuts go. Doug Engelbart's ideal pairing — one hand on a mouse, one on a keyboard — is beautiful to watch executed well, but the keyboard was never designed for that role, and the supply of modifier keys runs out. Shift + A for auto layout only existed because Alt + A was taken by artboard and Command + A by select all. Shortcuts aren't supposed to begin with Shift; the industry started doing it anyway once the free combinations ran dry.
The difficulty is motor memory. Command + S, Command + A, Command + B are effectively non-negotiable, and taking one away is close to impossible. The historical case Wichary cites: a touch typist who set the skill down for 25 years and, put back in front of a machine, typed again almost immediately — and again after another quarter of a century. Typing lives in a part of the brain separate from memory of who you are, which is why you can keep adding shortcuts but never redistribute them.
A book about keys, in three volumes
The project grew out of Medium's office rooms, named after typewriters and furnished with them as decoration. Every machine carried QWERTY but differed at the edges, and the curiosity about why never resolved. Each key turned out to be a fractal — backspace alone holds an entire set of stories.
Medium posts, including one on the Turkish typewriter that drew messages of thanks from Turkey, convinced him there were enough words for a book. Craig Mod's advice shaped the commitment: choose a subject that returns to you even when you don't want it, because there will be dark moments. The keyboard kept coming back.
The result is Shift Happens: three volumes in a slip case, 42 chapters, roughly 1,300 photographs, 520 of them full color, 37 Easter eggs, and four photos of keyboards set in Comic Sans. Wichary wrote and designed it himself and is publishing it via Kickstarter, having reversed an earlier assumption that self-publishing was only for authors who couldn't land a contract or an agent. The flattening of that divide changed his mind. He wants the book nerdy in the right ways — approachable enough to pick up and read one chapter front to back, with images deliberately chosen to carry the story rather than decorate it, engaging both halves of the reader's attention. Typographic and visual storytelling, he notes, is a skill he picked up partly from giving conference talks.
The five keyboards that mattered
Out of a collection of around 150 strange keyboards assembled for the book, Wichary went the other way and nominated milestones. The first QWERTY typewriter. The Underwood No. 5 — the first typewriter hit, the iPhone of its day. The electric typewriter with the font ball, a full reinvention. The Model M, the clicky mid-eighties board. And the iPhone, which changed how we think about keyboards. Those five get centerfolds.
He added a sixth personally: the Selectric. IBM kept improving the line, and the 1973 correcting Selectric II drew him in. He rented one. It plugs into the wall with no electronics, yet it types like a computer keyboard rather than a typewriter, and it carries features you would assume only computers have: a small buffer that remembers a second key pressed during an overlap, the interchangeable font ball, and a working backspace. The correction worked through chemistry — a film-like medium rather than conventional ink that adheres to paper weakly enough to be lifted off, so a mistake can be erased, especially if you type over it. It was a dead end, since computers made backspace the easiest key to implement; everything disappears if you stop paying attention.
The Selectric's internals also connect keys to the rotating ball through binary code, which people quickly exploited to use the machine as a terminal. IBM itself shipped Selectric IO as a computer terminal, and when display screens were prohibitively expensive, Selectrics served as the interface to computers. Wichary treats it as a missing link and calls the slow-motion footage of the Selectric ball alone a marvel.
What's on his desk
His own setup is less exotic than his research. To look it up, he has to check: a HEXgears Gemini, a TKL with no numpad because he doesn't use one, relatively modern, with lights he ignores. What matters is the blank keycaps in the shape of seventies terminal caps, the profile known as SA — a little from the past, a little from the future. The switches, yellow and custom rather than Cherry, are linear and on the quiet side for Zoom, chosen half for feel and half for necessity. Wichary confesses he doesn't remember exactly what they are.
The layout is plain QWERTY. He doesn't touch type well — only his left hand is genuinely fluent, something he noticed by recording himself. A Dvorak typewriter sits somewhere in his collection and he types on Turkish and other layouts during research, watching his fingers move differently. But there were never wrist or forearm problems, and never a need for extreme speed, so he stopped learning. QWERTY is good enough, and the same is true for most people.
The layout deserves more respect than it usually gets. It is intentional, it is universal, and the same physical arrangement types Chinese, Japanese, AZERTY, and Turkish. Nothing needs to be redesigned around it because computer keyboards from the eighties onward can be remapped. August Dvorak had the harder job in the thirties: convincing typewriter manufacturers to build an entirely new line, backed by scientific proof Wichary doubts was solid.
So Dvorak's mass adoption failed for reasons that had little to do with ergonomics — marketing, storytelling, and transition planning. Moving users off one shortcut already takes a huge, multi-year effort inside a single product, as Figma knows firsthand. Christopher Latham Sholes released the first QWERTY typewriter almost exactly 150 years ago, and could sit down at a modern machine and know what to do. That can read as disappointing, or as a remarkable success story. QWERTY didn't fail; it simply won.
What's still being learned
Book research continues, alongside 3JS for the website and a stretch of printing and marketing. Every historian hits the same wall, in his view: the artifacts survive, the decisions don't. He typed on the first QWERTY typewriter for a brief moment, in a museum, without being told what it was until he worked it out. No blog posts, no talks, and very few papers exist from the people behind the first typewriter, the Underwood No. 5, or the Selectric. He'd rather sit down over drinks with them. The book is partly an attempt to tell their stories on their behalf.
Writing a book is all-consuming, he warns anyone considering it, before a qualified recommendation. Outside his own domain he points to the YouTube musician Adam Neely, a model for going deep on a subject in an approachable way — why musicians need in-ear monitors, the difference between C sharp and B. Some of it goes over Wichary's head and it is always worth watching.
Aresluna, his site and handle, traces to Stanisław Lem, his favorite writer. In one novel a ship reports in using the word Aresluna without explanation — Ares for Mars, Luna for the Moon — which quietly establishes that the two destinations are traveled between so often that jargon has formed. That word-building, and a sound he liked, stuck with him.
The parting thought isn't about keyboards. The book exists because he looked closely at an everyday object he had assumed was boring. It wasn't boring at all. His suggestion to listeners is to find the other things in their lives worth poking at to see what happens — and, for the record, he expects keyboards and QWERTY to remain with us, so the book should hold up as a historical document for a while yet.
