Steins;Gate mouse pads for the desk

Padrift's Steins;Gate mouse pads and desk mats are original designs drawn from the Future Gadget Laboratory and its time-bending experiments, printed edge to edge on a 3 mm neoprene pad with a fabric top, a non-slip base and stitched edges. They come in eight desk sizes, from 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm), which leaves room for the mouse and a little more, to 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm) for a desk as cluttered as any lab bench, and every one is printed when you order it, not before.

Steins;Gate began as a visual novel by 5pb. and Nitroplus, released in 2009, with character designs by the illustrator huke, and White Fox adapted it into a 24-episode anime in 2011. Its hero, Rintaro Okabe, is a university student in Akihabara who calls himself a mad scientist and runs a tiny "lab" with two friends above a shop that sells old CRT televisions. When one of their gadgets, a microwave wired to a cell phone, turns out to send text messages into the past, the joke stops being funny.

A muted palette that's easy on the eyes

The Steins;Gate anime is drawn in a muted, slightly sepia palette: faded greens, browns, grays and the yellowish light of an old room in late afternoon. Next to most anime art it looks almost washed out, and that is exactly why it suits a desk. A Steins;Gate design doesn't shout over the monitor; it sits under the keyboard like an old photograph, calm beside wood, beige or gray peripherals and warm lamplight. For a desk where you work or study for hours, that restraint is a real advantage.

The divergence meter above the keys

The divergence meter, a row of glowing orange nixie tubes, tells Okabe how far the current world line has drifted from the one he started on, and the number 1.048596 has become the series' best-known figure. A row of digits is long and thin, which suits the top edge of a long mat: on an XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm), the tubes stay readable across the back while your hands work in front of them. Warm orange against a black background, next to a black keyboard, is one of the strongest contrasts you can put on a desk.

A lab bench, not a showroom

The Future Gadget Lab is a cramped apartment full of half-finished inventions, a sofa, a whiteboard, cables and a couple of desktop computers, where the friends hang out as much as they work. A desk that is a little messy, with a soldering iron, a breadboard or a pile of notes beside the keyboard, has more in common with that lab than with a spotless gaming showroom. A design in the lab's browns and greens, with gadget sketches or a whiteboard full of equations, suits a desk that is used for building things.

Daru's monitors and a programmer's desk

Itaru Hashida, known as Daru, is the lab's hacker, the friend who can get into almost any network and spends much of the series at a keyboard. He is the character a programmer or a computer science student will recognize. A design with green text on a black screen, a hacker's terminal or a wall of monitors looks at home on a desk with two screens and a mechanical keyboard, and dark green is a quiet accent under cool lighting.

Kurisu and the study desk

Kurisu Makise is an eighteen-year-old neuroscientist who has already had a paper published in a scientific journal when she meets Okabe, and she spends much of the series arguing with him, correcting him and quietly doing the hard part. She is the Steins;Gate character for a study desk. A Kurisu design, with her long auburn hair, or simply a stack of research papers and a cup of coffee, suits a desk covered in textbooks, and her warm reds look good under a desk lamp late at night.

Mayuri, Upa and the small pad

Mayuri Shiina, Okabe's childhood friend and the lab's second member, greets everyone with a cheerful "Tuturu!" and collects Upa, small round capsule toys of a character from a game within the story. An Upa is simple, round and soft-colored, which makes it a good subject for the 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm) pad: placed toward the top corner, it stays visible above your hand. Mayuri is the warmest presence in a dark story, and a pad built around her has the gentlest mood of any Steins;Gate design.

The rest of the lab members

The lab keeps growing as the story goes on, and each new member brings a look of their own to the desk.

• Suzuha Amane: the part-timer at the CRT shop downstairs, with long braids and a bicycle, for an energetic, sporty desk.
• Ruka Urushibara: the shy son of a shrine priest, who practices sword swings with Okabe's encouragement, in white and red, for a calm, light setup.
• Faris NyanNyan: the cat-eared star of a maid café, in pink, for a pastel desk with a playful streak.
• Moeka Kiryu: the quiet one who would rather text than talk, for a dark, minimal desk with a phone stand.

A group design that lines up every member works well on a 4XL, where there is room for each of them to stand clear of the keyboard and the mouse.

The PhoneWave and the gel bananas

The lab's time machine is the PhoneWave (name subject to change), a microwave oven connected to a cell phone. Its first unexpected result is a banana turned into a green, jelly-like mess, a scene that is both a joke and the first sign that something real is happening. Gadgets like these make funny small symbols: a microwave, a flip phone, a green banana. Scattered across a larger mat as a set of icons, they stay readable around the keyboard, and only someone who has watched the show will know why there is a banana on your desk.

Okabe and his lab coat

Okabe wears a white lab coat everywhere, strikes dramatic poses, talks into a phone to an imaginary organization and signs off with his made-up phrase "El Psy Kongroo." He is a lot of fun to put on a desk. On a long mat, place him at the end away from your mouse hand, mid-pose with the coat flaring, and he frames the keyboard without your wrist resting on him. As the story darkens, so does he, and a design from the later episodes, tired and serious, gives the same character a far quieter look.

A visual novel you read with the mouse

The original Steins;Gate is a visual novel, which means most of it is reading: long scenes of text and dialogue that you move through with a click, broken up by choices made on Okabe's phone through what the game calls the Phone Trigger. On PC, that is hours of slow, gentle mouse use, the opposite of a twitchy shooter. A cushioned 3 mm pad with an even fabric top makes those long reading sessions easier on the wrist, and a calm design suits a slow, story-heavy evening better than a loud one.

Akihabara after the shops close

In the first episode, something crashes into the roof of the Radio Kaikan building, and the series rarely strays far from those streets after that. The anime shows Akihabara mostly in faded daylight, but the district at night, with its stacked signs and electronics stores, gives a design a brighter, neon-lit alternative. A night street scene suits a dark gaming desk with colored lighting, while a daytime alley in the anime's sepia tones suits a work desk; both carry the same place in very different moods.

Steins;Gate 0 and Amadeus

Steins;Gate 0, a sequel visual novel released in 2015 and adapted as an anime in 2018, follows a different, bleaker world line in which Okabe has given up being a mad scientist. One of its central ideas is Amadeus, an artificial intelligence built from a scientist's memories that speaks through a phone or a computer screen. The sequel's palette is colder and darker than the original, grays, deep blues and the white light of screens, and it suits a minimal black desk with cool lighting.

A quiet nod for an office

Not everyone wants a full anime scene at work. A single row of orange digits on a dark pad, a lab coat hanging on a hook or a small Upa in one corner is enough to say Steins;Gate to anyone who has seen it. To everyone else, a pad with nixie-style numbers simply looks like a retro electronics print, which is a fitting disguise for a series about hiding what you know.

Sizes for a Future Gadget Lab desk

Every design has its own list of sizes on its product page. Use this as a guide to what each size suits.

Setup	Size	Good for
Mouse only	S, 11.8″ × 15.7″ (30 × 40 cm)	An Upa or a single nixie tube
Laptop or reading	TCG Mat, 14″ × 24″ (35.5 × 61 cm)	A visual novel night beside a laptop
Compact keyboard	M, 11.8″ × 27.6″ (30 × 70 cm)	Okabe at one end in his lab coat
Keyboard and mouse	XL, 15.7″ × 35.4″ (40 × 90 cm)	The divergence meter along the back edge
Deep desk	XXL, 23.6″ × 35.4″ (60 × 90 cm)	The lab's whiteboard and gadgets above the keys
Whole desk	4XL, 23.6″ × 47.2″ (60 × 120 cm)	Akihabara at night across the setup

Not every desk is deep: for long, narrow ones, L at 11.8″ × 31.5″ (30 × 80 cm) and 3XL at 19.7″ × 39.4″ (50 × 100 cm) are the better fit.

Gifts for a lab member

A Steins;Gate pad suits someone who played the visual novel, someone who watched the anime twice to catch what they missed the first time or a friend you've been trying to get to start it. Choose the divergence meter for a tech lover, Okabe for someone who enjoys his theatrics and an Upa for a small, sweet nod. If you can't see the desk, XL covers a full keyboard and mouse on most setups.

Production takes 1–3 business days because nothing is printed in advance; the pad then leaves Turkey and usually arrives at a US address in another 2–5 business days, so plan on two weeks for a birthday.

Looking after sepia tones

Beige, cream and faded green hide dust well but show darker marks from hands and drinks. Lift a fresh drip with a damp cloth, dabbing rather than rubbing. When the pad needs a proper wash, use lukewarm water and a few drops of mild soap, clean it by hand, rinse it thoroughly and squeeze the water out by rolling it in a towel before laying it flat to dry. Washing machines, dryers and irons all stay off the list.

A note on names

Steins;Gate, the Future Gadget Lab and the series' characters and gadgets are mentioned only to describe what inspired our designs. Padrift isn't affiliated with MAGES., Nitroplus, White Fox or huke, and none of them sponsors or endorses these pads.