Hey everyone, I’m really enjoying making watch faces on here, but my problem is that I just can’t seem to come up with any ideas. I want to be able to make faces but I can’t come up with ideas of what to make them look like. Do you designers have any tips for how to come up with ideas? Thanks.
The magic word is: Google… 
Before i started my own creations i made a huge research on famous analog and digital watchmakers and brands - just to find out their special styles, to learn about colour combinations, face arrangements, bezel variants. It was some sort of brainstorming combined with picture overload. 
After that, i had enough ideas.
Or you pick a theme at first (landscapes, people, movies …) and consider what type of watch you would like to wear on your wrist.
Greetings,
Phantasico aka GAUSS
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I work from what my Followers like and from what I like to wear. You’ll be able to get an idea of that based on syncs and reviews. Most of my designs are for ladies. They don’t care as much for dials, animations, and all the stats that the men’s watch faces display.
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Since I’m in the same boat of lack of creativity often. I’ll also go online for inspiration. In order of where I find inspiration:
- youtube
What I’m looking at:
- real watches
- smartwatches
- interesting GIFs
- interesting art
- interesting graphic designs/textures
- interesting UX or UI design
I keep a notepad file and list ideas - good or bad and don’t stress about if they’re something everyone is going to like.
I’m still mostly sticking to pop culture related items so I can get the basics down while experimenting with techniques.
That’s one thing I’ve seen with the premium designers that I like… they’ll experiment and sometimes in experimenting you can come up with something cool or it can springboard into something else.
I keep a folder of watch images. when I come across something cool, I snap a screen capture and throw it in the folder for later on when I cant think of anything.
I cruise through watches.com. Click “collections” on the top menu. There’s sections like Unusual Watches or Most Popular or Colorful and use them for ideas.
I also cruise the royalty-free stock photography sites like shutterstock.com or 123rf.com. I do strange searches like “abstract metal background” and scan through the images to get ideas about a watchface background that’s not a typical watchface.
john