My CASIO W-64 watch face concept, unfortunately, impossible at the moment.

Designing an Apple Watch Face

In my last post, I covered my experience with the Apple Watch, and how it was possible to achieve a great deal of customizations mix-matching watch faces and bands.

When I got my watch (on watchOS 5), the watch faces available were not that many. Some of them looked good but had almost no customization possible, while others that allowed customizations were not appealing to me (i.e. Infograph watch face, way too colorful).

With watchOS 6 Apple added a bunch of new watch faces and also improved some of my main concerns with existing ones (Infograph watch face now has monochrome complications that look so much better).

Left: Infograph Watchfaces in watchOS 5 in White and Black; Right: Monochromatic Infograph in Mellow Yellow in watchOS 6+

After some research I confirmed my previous assumption: the watch faces are closed to 3rd party developers, meaning, no one but Apple can design them.

I can only hope this will change in the future but it will most likely take many years mainly because of two reasons: Apple likes to have control over the look and feel, and also the user experience of its products. Secondly because of their business model at the moment with special editions from premium brands. Take the Hermès Edition, for example, it’s basically the exact same watch (yes, better materials and hefty price tag), but it will also come with unique watch faces for the Hermès edition alone. Making watch faces open to developers could end this exclusiveness and hurt Hermès customers and brand.

Hermès and Nike edition watch faces.

Continuing with my exploration I started imagining how a custom watch face could be designed.

Inspiration

As an inspiration, I took one of the first watches I ever owned while growing up: the CASIO W-64.

My dear CASIO W-64, still kicking to this day.

It features a small display with the time (in 12 or 24hrs format), date and alarm indicator. It also has stopwatch mode and light (a real lightbulb!).

Overall aesthetics

First, similarly to the Casio watch, the color outlines are designed to follow the shape of the casing:

Next, positioning the display:

Typography:

For the display typography, I tried several different 7-segment fonts, but I couldn’t find one that was close enough to the original so I decided to custom design that as well, although it took quite some time.

One interesting find is the “DSEG” font which has different weights and characters including a 14-segment font and even icons for weather.

As for my custom design, the process is fairly easy using illustrator:

Outline one digit (in red) and set separator lines (in green).

Repeat for other digits.

Finally, recolor on and off segments for each digit.

Final Elements

Redefining the meaning of labels in the Apple Watch.

Indicators are repositioned to match physical buttons, and labels are redefined to reflect actions on the Apple Watch while maintaining similar lingo.

This way Digital Crown becomes “Mode” and Notification Center: “Adjust”.

Bands

As a final touch, I designed custom bands that would also resemble the original straps from Casio. This is the result:

Customization

As with any watch face, customizations available could include style, color, and complications.

So… how does it look?

Casio watch face concept on my wrist, and side by side with original watch.

Trying out a different color scheme and matching band.

What’s next

There are many other Casio watches that I would like to replicate and adapt to the Apple Watch:

Conclusions

With the right guidelines from Apple I don’t see any reasons why the face watch designs should be kept closed to 3rd party developers. It would be very interesting to see what other people can come up with and exciting for me as a developer.

Personally, I found the process to be very fun and the results surprisingly good.