{"id":141463,"date":"2022-11-28T03:01:09","date_gmt":"2022-11-28T03:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/what-would-you-change-about-googles-pixel-watch-faces\/"},"modified":"2022-11-28T03:01:09","modified_gmt":"2022-11-28T03:01:09","slug":"what-would-you-change-about-googles-pixel-watch-faces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/what-would-you-change-about-googles-pixel-watch-faces\/","title":{"rendered":"What would you change about Google’s Pixel Watch faces?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Google did a good job providing a range of default watch faces on the Pixel Watch. Having lived with the first-generation wearable for an extended period, we have some design thoughts and improvements in mind.<\/p>\n

Non-skeuomorphic hands<\/h2>\n

There are 10 analog watch faces with four of them doing something rather clever with the design of the hands. Classic, Dial, Ink, and Pilot feature pill-shaped hour hands that are hollow in the middle. As such, you can easily view the complications in the background. Similarly, Dial’s minute hand does not extend all the way from the center to the edge, so there’s not too much of an obstruction.<\/p>\n

These design choices greatly aid legibility and reflect Google’s understanding that its faces do not have to mirror mechanical designs perfectly. Similar to how most watch faces let you disable the second hand, a nice tweak would be letting you enable the hollow hour design on Analog, Pacific, Pilot Bold, and Shapes. <\/p>\n

digital start<\/h2>\n

Concentric, unsurprisingly, has the most unique digital watch face design of the nine available today. The Dial I and II layouts help showcase the round nature of the Pixel Watch, but Half Dial is what makes Concentric unique. <\/p>\n

Most of the other digital watch faces are staid in that they sometimes just feel like numbers, text, and shapes on a black background. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and I use Utility daily, but it pales in comparison to Concentric, where the time is displayed in a unique manner that’s an homage to analog\/circles but is something that would mostly not be possible mechanically. The complication placement to the side is nice and Google should update Radial so its analog clock also supports digital time. <\/p>\n

One thing that Google masterfully avoided is what I call the crowded G-Shock look that some digital faces rush to adopt. They pack so much information that legibility greatly suffers. It’s good that the Pixel Watch left that choice to the realm of third-party faces.<\/p>\n

Google should take inspiration from its past to make more unique, Concentric-esque watch faces. ustwo’s Portions watch face from the Android Wear 2.0 launch should be modernized as that was a good and unique digital approach.<\/p>\n

Complications <\/h2>\n

Complication slots are the reason Utility is my daily driver with four being the minimum for me. Index leans too much into the \u201ctext on a background\u201d effect for me. However, the most widely used complication style is the circle with the rectangular slot style only properly leveraged by Media controls and Next event. <\/p>\n

As third-party Wear OS 3 support grows, Google should guide developers into better supporting the rectangle complication while also adding it to more faces.<\/p>\n

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Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n