Review: Work Louder Creator Board

The staggered QWERTY has been the default keyboard layout for decades in most English-speaking countries, but it’s hard not to wonder—is there room for change? Is QWERTY itself the peak of our keyboard efficiency? These are questions Work Louder tries to address with the Creator Board, a keyboard that sacrifices the staggered layout for a more tailored experience. This keyboard is not for everyone, and that's OK.

The Work Louder Creator Board is a modular, ortholinear 40 percent keyboard meant for digital content creators who work regularly with any number of shortcut-heavy content creation tools—video and photo editing being the most common. It's still a QWERTY layout, but “ortholinear” means the keys are aligned in a square grid instead of being slightly staggered. If you look at your QWERTY keyboard right now, your Y key is not directly above the H, which is not directly above the N—they're staggered. On an ortholinear keyboard, those three keys are in precisely one line. The “40 percent” means this keyboard cuts off the number row and changes the sizes of some other keys to save space.

The keyboard itself is assembled in about the simplest way possible: Start with a printed circuit board (PCB), solder on some low-profile switches, connect that to a main daughterboard, and screw all of it onto a slab of polycarbonate. It’s about as close to a pedal board as it is to a traditional keyboard—and it’s just as customizable. With a hex screw, you can completely disassemble and rearrange this keyboard’s layout in a matter of minutes.

The typing experience itself is, expectedly, strange. The first few times I used it, I was completely disoriented—my typing speed was a solid 25 words per minute. That slowly increased to 60 and eventually approached 90 with some practice, though that was still far from my usual 115 wpm. Even after coming to grips with the layout, I found myself missing keys, stopping to think, and having to look down at my hands far more than I normally would.

The switches themselves—Kailh Choc Brown low-profile switches—feel less like a mechanical keyboard and more like a beefed-up laptop keyboard. The tactile bump is hardly noticeable due to the switches’ shorter (3.0-mm total) travel distance and ultimately feels more like a bit of extra scratch than anything intentional. These switches are more efficient to type on but lack the longer travel that makes traditional mechanical switches feel so good. However, I know some people who swear by their ortholinear keyboard—just look at the r/olkb subreddit. It’s a layout that has a distinct learning curve and one that takes time and dedication to get used to.

There are some parts of this keyboard I just can’t get the hang of, though, no matter how hard I try. Specifically, the spacebar. It’s two keys wide, yet it sits on a single switch. This means that, unless you hit the spacebar dead center, it won’t register your key press. The entire time I used this keyboard, it bothered me to levels I couldn't properly articulate. At least once per paragraph, I would miss the switch under the spacebar, and it would awkwardly angle itself down like a poorly maintained see-saw without registering the key press.

There are two solutions to this. A keycap's width is measured in “u," so the letters and numbers on your keyboard are all typically “1u.” Since the spacebar on the Creator Board is a 2u, I replaced the keycap with a 1u key, leaving 0.5u gaps on either side. This doesn’t fix anything, but it does make it easier for my thumb to know where to press, since there isn’t any dead space.

The second solution is a testament to this keyboard’s customizability, but could also be seen as a representation of its greatest flaw. If you want, you can desolder the singular spacebar switch and replace it with two regular keys, which can then function as a split spacebar. It’s a great solution, but it feels like it’s solving a problem of its own creation. For what it's worth, Work Louder says it's considering adding a stabilizer to the spacebar key, which would eliminate the issue. That would be fantastic, and I'd wait to buy one until this fix.

What matters is how effective this keyboard is for multimedia editing. And, quite frankly, it’s brilliant if you have the time to customize it. This keyboard comes preinstalled with a generic 40 percent layout to get you started, and it lets you change whatever you want right out of the box using VIA, one of the most powerful keyboard customization tools available today.

With VIA, you can change whatever you want. Need to add a second mode that transforms all of your keys into shortcuts? Need to scroll through brush sizes using a dial? Or how about setting one of your keys to automatically apply your favorite Adobe Lightroom preset? As long as the command can be quantified as a series of consistent mouse movements and key presses, you can do it.

Some of my favorite everyday uses for the dials include zooming in and out, swapping between windows, and adjusting system volume—all of which I can have mapped to different dials at the same time! Work Louder has hinted at other modules that can be added to the Creator Board, like a specialized module for audio production, but it hasn't announced anything yet.

All of this doesn’t mean the Creator Board is going to be your single-keyboard solution to everything. As a purpose-built tool, it naturally falls short in other places. Number-heavy typing is an absolute slog due to the lack of a number row, and the limited design doesn’t exactly lend itself to gaming either, so you’ll likely want a second keyboard stowed away for when you need it.

But there’s a huge elephant in the room: the price. This keyboard has the design, charm, and niche functionality of a Teenage Engineering product, with a matching price too. The base Creator Board starts at $259. With both add-ons (what I was sent for review), it will run you $409. The XL version, which adds on a number pad with a larger footprint, brings the total to $559. That’s a lot.

If you’re the kind of person who wants a keyboard with these features, it’s one of the only options on the market. Sure, there are other modular keyboards, other ortholinear boards, and others that are deeply customizable, but this is the only keyboard that combines all of those into a single package. I think it’s fantastic for the specific use cases it’s intended for. If you look at this keyboard and think, “That’s exactly what I need,” then you'll be very happy with it. This keyboard does exactly what it’s meant to, and I think that’s beautiful, even if it’s not for everyone.