azure junco
I have been noodling around with a mock-up of a Fraktur themed watchface. Fraktur in the sense of the blackletter typeface and in the sense of Pennsylvania folk art of the same name. I have only the most basic experience with illustration, so...
But I have enough here to start implementation, and I thought I would put this up here for feedback.
zinc vortex
Looks nice
jolly lichen
oh that's a very pretty layout
azure junco
I am very pleased with the bluetooth indicator. I don't think I would have gotten anywhere beyond just the text if I hadn't come up with that bit to get me going.
I am falling down the rabbit hole of blackletter calligraphy now. Uh oh.
azure junco
Should I make this a detailed dev diary with lots of posts about tiny steps and issues? Is that what anybody comes to this channel for?
jolly lichen
I would love to read that!
azure junco
Okay, cool.
azure junco
First run. Just the background and the bluetooth indicator. I'm using my pebble-fctx package for rendering, as I do.
I've drawn the bluetooth indicator in Affinity Designer, exported it to SVG, and converted it to FPath using a new converter, written in Python, which is going to replace the Javascript pebble-fctx-compiler package. The converter looks in the SVG for a circle named "pivot" and then transform the shapes so that the center of that circle becomes the (0,0) point of the paths. But that's clearly not working, so I'll have to figure that out.
With such low contrast colors, fctx can't really do anything to anti-alias the shapes. There just aren't any intermediate colors to use.
azure junco
Found the little bug with the pivot point for the bluetooth art. I thought I had used and tested that code already, but I guess I had not.
The art for this is made of 12 individual "leaf" shapes drawn over a hexagon. The hexagon provides the interior fill color. I'm using a hexagon instead of a circle so that there aren't any little color artifacts around the outer edge of the circle. All of the leaf shapes could just be a single leaf shape drawn with different positions and rotations, but then I would have to do the fiddly math for that, and it just doesn't seem worth the trouble. The whole thing is only 1018 bytes of data anyhow. I could probably shave a little bit off of that as well. There are little tiny line segments in there that were a side effect of how I drew the art, and they could be cleaned up to reduce the data size.
azure junco
Jeez, it looks bigger than I expected. We'll see how it looks with everything else. Black or Dark Gray? Dark Gray looks nice in a screenshot. Will have to check it on hardware one day. One day when I get a Time 2. This might be a Time 2 exclusive.
I just realized that I have no plan for AM/PM. I just always use 24h format and I didn't think about 12h until I had to write the code. It would certainly fit the mood to write it out all latin style "ante meridiem" and "post meridiem". But I don't think there is enough room in the layout. And even if I made room and squeezed it in, it wouldn't be very readable. Is it important? Does anybody look at their watch and not know if it is AM or PM?
Oh, the font I'm using is one I found on FontStruct, called "zerbeer Blk eYe/FS". Finding it inspired me to try and make a watch face with it. It's not really a Fraktur typeface as I understand the term, but I like it.
small sonnet
Found the little bug with the pivot point for the bluetooth art. I thought I ha...
Oooh seeing that image made me think of azulejos (tile art popular in Mexico, and other Spanish/Portuguese places)
I might have to make a watchface inspired by that 🤔
azure junco
Oooh seeing that image made me think of azulejos (tile art popular in Mexico, an...
I love the calaveras.
azure junco
I had to do a bit of extra math work to center a text made of two different font sizes. And, I am pretty sure the date text is going to be too big and it's going to crowd into the illustration around the edge. "December" isn't even the widest month. I might make non-initial letters a smaller size, or I might just condense the type a tiny bit horizontally. I can do that pretty easily with a non-uniform scale factor. I think narrower type actually looks a bit more like the examples of Fraktur folk art that I've seen. They seem to tend toward a tall and narrow hand. The time text I will leave at the normal width so that it can fill the space and read well.
And that is enough for today.
Vibes.
I am bad at Discord.
jolly lichen
Found the little bug with the pivot point for the bluetooth art. I thought I ha...
the amount of thought that you put into the bluetooth indicator is fascinating. i would've slapped a bitmap layer with shown/hidden and called it a day, haha
azure junco
the amount of thought that you put into the bluetooth indicator is fascinating. ...
Hahaheh. I just gotta do things on hard mode.
zinc vortex
It's really well done
azure junco
Good morning world. Woke up to some proper snow this morning.
As expected, the date text is just too wide for the framing vines. I'll have to do a bit of squeezing.
I usually do my drawing very procedurally, but this time I'm leaning very heavily on SVG resources. It gets me to thinking about tooling to basically generate a working watch face from an SVG. Would have to figure out a kind of meta-data scheme to tell it which texts were the time or date or such. Sounds complex and is probably even harder than that. And of course, this design would break it immediately with the big, red initials.
I'm hoping I can tune the shape of my background chiclet to follow the physical curves of the Time 2 when it comes. It bugs me a bit to see the rounded-rectangle shape of the screen set inside the more graceful curves of the bezel. It wasn't as bad on the OG Time because the bezels were just so big, but on the Time 2 it's really obvious how the shapes clash.
zinc vortex
Good effort on that regard
I too would have liked to see a more true-to-OG-PT-2 watch body myself or even a metal P2-like. The departure in industrial design makes it not-a-pebble for me personally.
but I don't mean to hijack your channel lol
but, generous of you to accommodate for that
as you are right - the new form factor can create clash
but the beauty of Pebble is you can adapt for that!
azure junco
Maybe the CT2 will grow on you. I mean, to my eye, none of the previous Pebble types really share a design language either, so I don't really feel that the CT2 is any more not-a-pebble than the Round, or the Times, or the Steel were. I've totally forgotten now what the PT2 (2015) looked like! Haha.
I like the lines of the CT2, and rectangular screens are rectangular, and huge bezels mean less pixels, so I can't really think of how I would do the CT2 any differently to address the shape clash, unless perhaps a PTR style overlapping bezel to mask off the corners of the display? But that seems fraught. So, yeah, software I think is the answer, hehe.
azure junco
Whoops, forgot that fonts are upside down and need to be flipped.
There we go. 90% horizontal scaling is about right.
I expect the layout of the month, date, and weekday text is going to need a lot of tweaking before I'm done.
azure junco
Haha, yeah, that layout is garbage. Probably do want to make it a three line layout like the mockup. I'm going to press ahead and get the battery charge state in there first though.
I hope it's not too twee, but I really do like using the modern English translations of the Old English/Germanic names of the days. The English names of the days always seemed so bizarre until I learned where they came from, and now they just tickle me.
azure junco
The battery charge indicator is meant to be a seed-pod / pea-pod motif. When your watch is on it's last pea, you should charge it. Haha. Oy.
I think that is enough for this morning. Gotta go shovel snow.
Later on I think I'll try removing the green color fill from the bluetooth thingy. It might be too much.
And the leaves might need a centerline or two shades of green.
I really wasn't expecting this design to have such a liquor label aesthetic, but I'm not complaining.
zinc vortex
What do you call the flower in the top?
And what is its significance to German culture?
azure junco
I call it "the bluetooth thingy" haha, but it is a Hex sign and I won't even try to paraphrase the wikipedia article. The fact that the bluetooth logo is derived from runes just makes it that much better.
azure junco
Yeah, I think I like the bluetooth thingy better without the background fill. Not entirely sure about the color for offline though. And I just now figured out that you can't get a screenshot from the emulator after you turn off bluetooth. Derp.
zinc vortex
Nice
azure junco
Ugh, as expected, I am struggling to get a typographic layout that works for different combinations of wide and narrow months and days.
azure junco
After monkeying around with it all morning, I've ended up nearly back where I started. Going to let it rest for a while.
Should I just publish it for emery? 😅 It can just be there waiting until I get mine next year some time.
azure junco
I've been going to bed so early, I don't think I've seen the time get into the 20-something hours. It probably gets too wide. I might have to put in a little dynamic squeezing code for the time, like I did for the date.
azure junco
Looks good boss
thx!
jolly lichen
Should I just publish it for emery? 😅 It can just be there waiting until I ge...
I bet you could talk @coral oracle into testing on hw
azure junco
Haha, I don't need to distract JP from their important work.
azure junco
First baby steps towards the basalt build. I added an option to my FPath conversion tool to add resource tags to the output filenames.
azure junco
I think it turned out okay on basalt. I was worried it might just be too small for readability. I decided I could just use a single asset for the bluetooth and change the drawing scale, instead of producing a scaled down resource. The background and vines had to be a new assets though, because basalt and emery are not just differently sized, they are differently shaped.
OMGosh, it's so cute. But dark gray is not going to cut it.
The text is even more washed out than it looks in the photo.
Good lort, I can count the threads on my coaster. Cameras these days...
zinc vortex
wow that's really pretty
azure junco
Okay, made the text black, changed the bluetooth offline color to an orange, and added a center vein line to the leaves. Are they too thin? And should the battery "peas" be a wee bit larger?
jolly lichen
that is sooo pretty
zinc vortex
it totally matches the needlepoint
azure junco
I have squeezed the time inwards just a bit, limiting it to a width that is a little narrower than the date limit. And I did make the peas just a little bigger, and tweaked the vertical position by half a pixel. I think it's ready to go.
azure junco
Haha, it was bound to happen eventually. I uploaded the special screenshot build to the app store.
I've been so paranoid about doing something like that.
Wow, this was my eighth watch face.
Eek. Something has gone sideways with Fraktur. It crashed out a couple of times and now it won't transfer to the watch at all.
Reinstalled it and is okay for the moment... My phone was being really weird right when I was first publishing it. Maybe it was just sunspot activity.
jolly lichen
psst 😉
azure junco
Wow! Thanks for posting that. I think the shape looks pretty close to matching the glass shape.
jolly lichen
Yeah I think it fits wonderfully
azure junco
I've been running it on a Time for a while now and seeing the big screen I can now really tell the difference in the layout caused by the slightly different aspect ration between them. The text feels just a little more open on emery.
The space is filled a little more on basalt.
I guess we are in the same time zone.
