There is a wonderful watch brand called Pebble. It was first released in 2013, as a record-setting Kickstarter campaign. It had an e-paper display and the platform was very open, with an active and passionate community releasing hundreds of watchfaces and apps. In 2016 Fitbit bought Pebble, seemingly mostly for Pebble’s excellent sleep-tracking algorithm. The Pebble community took over watch app hosting once official support was gone, around 2018. Eventually Google acquired Fitbit, and the original Pebble founder was able to re-aquire the Pebble license and code from Google, restarting watch production with a new company Core Devices.
I was a happy owner of one of the old-gen Pebble Time Steel watches, but mine was showing its age. When Core Devices announced new Pebble watches, I was quick to sign up. Since it has arrived, I’ve enjoyed loading up abstract, cryptic watchfaces. Many of them are implementations of designs from Tokyoflash, a watch design concept blog with a futuristic, minimalist, and cryptic aesthetic.
Recently I decided to try my hand at making some abstract watchfaces of my own. So far I made two three, as part of a series I’m calling “Primitives”, referring to primitive shapes like circles, lines, and squares.
Primitives 01
The shading in the background covers the half furthest from the traditional clock hour mark for that hour. In this screenshot the purple shading faces 8:00. Stripes on the edge of the shading indicate tens of minutes, and three tens become a thick stripe. Here the time is 8:48. The final digit comes from treating the circles as negative space - an eight. The round watch shows 6:36.
Primitives 02
The second watchface uses the same scheme to convey the hour - a shaded part of the background aimed at an analog clock hour mark. The tens of minutes (green) are a large number made from arcs from a circle, and the minutes (blue) are on top of that, smaller. The left time shows 3:47. The round watch shows 4:39.
Primitives 03
This one is a challenge to read at first. These are showing 11:52 PM on the 21st. The face is divided into 3 columns and 5 rows. The hour is shown by vertical bars along the edge (RED bars in the second image): the most-clockwise part marks the hour like an analog clock.
Tens of minutes are shown in the middle three cells as a tally (GREEN in the second image), using three verticals and two horizontals.
The second digit of the minutes is large, made with horizontal bars (BLUE in the second image).
The date is made with the shaded cells: the top row is three tens, and below that are nine ones. In the second image they are BLACK and are two tens and a one for the 21st. The bottom row of shaded cells are for low-battery, PM indicator, and lost-Bluetooth.