The case for better watch typography (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The case for better watch typography (2021)

hodinkee.com

58 pointsnequo34 comments

TBH the benefits of a watch face with arms is that you read it via geometry without parsing. You don’t even need the numbers in the first place.

If you absolutely must know that it's precisely 14:22:04 it's not the device for you. But typically you only need to know that it's around 9, or it's not that close to 9 so you have some time to finish up before you leave.

The article isn’t saying that watchmakers should improve the legibility of the fonts used on the watch face though, it’s arguing that pride in craftsmanship seems to end at the font selection when there is a huge world of possibilities. I didn’t know that even Patek Phillipe has used Arial, that was amusing. These are easily $10k+ watches.

> If you absolutely must know that it's precisely 14:22:04 it's not the device for you.

I think that's false. Railroads used precise watches and published timetables to coordinate train movements well before signals were invented; your watch is wrong, you hit another train head on. So if you want to know that it's 14:22:04, the watch has been your device for 200 years.

They used it because it was the best technology available at the time. And many regulations were put in place to ensure watches for the railways were more accurate than the ones built for the masses, because of those crashes you mention. The railways really drove improvement in watchmaking.

I’m sure the railroads would not bother relying on syncing mechanical watches today, there are much better and more accurate tools. I say this as a fan of mechanical watches.

I was writing in this case about 2024. My analogue apple watch face is synced either via nntp or perhaps directly from the GPS stratum 0 time, but typically I simply glance at it and perhaps walk a little faster. Or not.

We used to have various rituals for syncing clocks and precision timepieces before the advent of quartz digital watches, NTP, and such. Fun as such things were to watch in the movies and at the Olympics, I never needed such precision in my daily life.

That’s only due to extensive synchronization and much more accurate timekeeping. Modern extremely high quality mechanical watches today are only accurate to something like +/-5 seconds per day. If you wear one for months it may be off by minutes.

Today’s quartz watches are accurate to something like 1 second a year (for really good ones), but those didn’t exist back in timetable railroad days.

Perhaps this is why the canonical designed clock/watch face comes form Swiss Railways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

There was a huge uproar when Apple used it in early iPhones. Also, TIL, trains in Switzerland always leave stations on the full minute mark.

I’d say that it requires good arm design for that to work. This might seem obvious, but I have a watch that I like as an accessory because the “arms” make cool hatch patterns, but the minute and hour hand are not distinct enough to be read at a glance. Now, I purposefully bought the watch as a fashion piece so I’m satisfied, since I always have my phone, but it turned out to be a lot less legible than I thought!

RGM is an American watchmaker with really interesting, often vintage-inspired typography on their watches: https://www.rgmwatches.com/

I love the style of these. Know of anything similar at a lower price point?

eBay. Hamilton.

Not USA made, but Farer has some interesting designs https://farer.com/

I was hoping for some examples of what the author would consider to be bad typography on a watch, typography they don't like. Instead, we just get a generic statement of "Many brands use off the shelf fonts but small." Perhaps this is them subtly implying that they don't like it, but to me that just sounds like they're "acceptable", not "bad". Combine that with the fact that typography is about as subjective as music, I see no issue with how things are currently.

I think they didn’t want to antagonize any specific watch brand.

Any example of bad typography, for my money, is Louis Vuitton’s latest watch, which uses Myriad (Adobe Illustrator’s default font): https://eu.louisvuitton.com/eng-e1/products/tambour-automati...

Except there's nothing on that watch that uses Myriad. The letter N is the easy example.

The typography on the watch is pretty great, even if the watch is not my style and not my price range.

Rolex mostly makes good typeface decisions (largely sticking with what has worked for decades), but modern Explorer numeral indices are awful. Explorer ref 1016 from the 60s is a design icon and nearly perfect, which just makes the current poor choices stand out all the more.

Rolex has also made the fonts a little too large and prominent on the modern watches.

People don’t really care about of telling the time with those expensive mechanical watches.

A quartz watch with a digital display is much easier to tell the time as well as more accurate.

People don't always want the optimal solution for every problem. I want a watch that is mechanical yet accurate enough and readable enough to function as a watch. I am not alone in this.

In the realms of cars, I drive a $15k used Subaru because it gets me places, is easy and cheap to maintain, and functional for cargo and other uses. Others drive fancy beautiful automobiles that do less, cost more money, but fulfill other artistic needs of theirs.

For some it's cars. For others watches. For yet others clothes. I for one am glad that not every problem is solved perfectly efficiently. It feels _humam_ that way.

Depends what you mean by "telling the time" though. How many minutes you have left from 8:58 to 9:34? Analog watch is easier for that stuff. Also approximations - quick glance to see if the long hand is getting close to the hour, the quarter hour, noon, etc. No number parsing needed, it's just gestalt.

Exactly; the point of wearing a watch isn't to tell the time, it's to signal wealth or otherwise be fashionable. Honestly, the thing could be completely broken or dead and it really wouldn't matter. It would make more sense if men just stopped pretending these things are functional, and started wearing fancy bracelets instead of watches.

I'm pretty sure 2025 will see the rise of the Koteka in western society, especially since it doubles up as a sundial.

That's a bit of a stretch I think, but it seems like tattoos are now the way men (and also women) try to show individuality, since their clothing choices are so boring.

Very true, but if the history of fashion teaches us anything it's certainly that nothing lasts forever and what once was often returns.

Tattoos will soon reach the status of wallpaper at the old people's home and the codpiece will rise again! ( Along with some inevitable 'stretch' ).

> Today, bespoke lettering is the exception, not the expectation. That makes it all the more commendable when a brand goes the extra mile.

It doesn't make it commendable? The first example is just bad letters, the separation makes no sense visually (it's a single number, it's not composed of two parts of something else), just decreases legibility

This would be a great idea for an Apple Watch app.

It's currently impossible to provide custom watch faces for the Apple Watch.

This is somewhat infuriating, especially given Apple's default watch face options. They all look nice at a first glance, but all have some small functional detail that really throws me off.

For example, what on earth are the minute/second subdivisions on most of them? It's not seconds, it's not half-seconds! What's up with the "UTC" watchface not being able to act like an actual "UTC watch"? And why is it so hard to get readable second-level precision on any of them? It's the most precise watch I own, but every new year's eve, I'm botching the countdown by having to somewhat eyeball it.

> For example, what on earth are the minute/second subdivisions on most of them?

The "watchy" faces are minutes/seconds and divisions thereof. For example, by default, "Chronograph" is seconds and ¼ seconds, and "Chronograph Pro" is seconds and ½ seconds.

On the GMT face, you can assign UTC to one of the dials, or get a UTC widget that works with any face that supports widgets.

> And why is it so hard to get readable second-level precision on any of them?

It also infuriates me that there is no way to view the current seconds on the iPhone clock. I have the Hodinkee app installed mostly because it has a seconds-precise clock included.

Sure there is. You have to look at the clock icon (analogue). ... Yeah it's bad.

>It's currently impossible to provide custom watch faces for the Apple Watch. >This is somewhat infuriating, especially given Apple's default watch face options.

Why is this infuriating? It should be expected: it's just like this with all Apple stuff. You use it the way they want you to, or you don't use it at all. If you want something customizable, you don't get an Apple.

Heck, I'd be surprised if any LCD-faced watches allow custom watch faces, but Apple is the last company I'd ever expect this from.

It can be both expected and infuriating, no?

I otherwise really like the Apple Watch, and it doesn’t bother me nearly enough to switch to a different smartwatch.

If I find something "infuriating", I'm most likely not going to buy it, unless I don't have much of a choice. "Infuriating" is a strong word.

If something just isn't as good as I'd like it to be, I'd call that "annoying".

I have a mechanical keyboard, and it doesn't tilt quite as much as I'd like. Otherwise, I like it, so I just sat the back of it on some spacers to raise it a bit. It's "slightly annoying", at most, that the keyboard didn't have enough height-adjustment range built-in to avoid this, but I certainly wouldn't call it "infuriating". That would be when the product just breaks irrepairably a day after the warranty ends.

Well, they currently have a set of default faces. But, you could just build a regular app, that's a watch face.

Been wearing a Yeswatch (.com) since 2005. See available daylight at a glance. Set alarms for sunrise, sunset. So many features, plus a great case/bracelet (Ti, waterproof to 10atm). You're welcome

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