[WatchFace] triplet spiral

Yet another unconventional face design from @mountain_lion

I started out with this face using the RGB primary colours , but the blue can be hard to read on a dark background, so I opted to publish a 2nd face using yellow instead of blue.

Comments welcome. :slight_smile:

First attempt (RGB): Edit: now using a lighter blue as suggested.

Second attempt (RGY):

  • I like RGB version best
  • I like RGY version best
  • I don’t like either version

0 voters

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I feel like it’d be more cohesive if you made all the spirals either all versions of blue, or cool colors, or all hot colors. But if you want to keep the blue that you have in the first one, you could just lighten it up slightly and it’d show up much better.

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Thanks @Rator

I think I need an “artistical partner” to round off my face ideas :smile:
This face can look much better without altering the basic idea or adding any more technical elements, but those tweaks are not my forte…

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Lightened the blue as suggested.

Changing colours is a bit of a pain (time consuming) when multiple layers are involved; I might consider other colour option later.

I don’t subscribe to Creator Pro, so do not have access to themes.
Even if I had, I guess setting up the themes would require changes to multiple layers, or does Creator Pro allow using variables (or even better direct expressions) to set the layer colour?

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I like the moving dot on the spirals, but why ain’t the numbers (seconds) changing?

I think what is confusing you, is that this face does not have a digital read out for seconds.
Only for hours, minutes & day of the month. :slight_smile:

The number in the center of the top right (green) spiral is minutes.
The dot moving on the green spiral moves according to seconds, i.e. the number will change when the dot reaches the center of the spiral, i.e. at the end of each minute.

Similar for the left spiral (red): number indicates hours, dot moves according to minutes, number changes when the dot reaches the center of the spiral, i.e. at the end of each hour.

The number in the center of the bottom right spiral (blue/yellow) indicates the day of the month.
The dot moving on the spiral moves according to hours (24) elapsed of the day, number changes when the dot reaches the center of the spiral, i.e. at the end of the day.

So to read the time, you read red and green and to read the date, you read blue/yellow.
It is an alternative face and is not intended to be 100% intuitive at first glance, although it should make logical sense once you have studied it. Many will not like it at all.

Aaah! That makes sense. It is not a watch face for me, but i like the spiral as a concept. Very clever!

Ok, it’s easier to read the blue now, but you could go lighter.

What you could do to quickly see which colors you might like, is take a screenshot of the face, then take it into photoshop and select each area and change its color.

(also, I might make the “wednesday” into just “wed” and “february” to “feb”. You might be able to make it a little bigger and thus make it easier to read.)

Thanks @Rator

Could you perhaps comment on my earlier question regarding Creator Pro?

There’s an icon/checkbox next to every layer that you can check to tell it to be affected by the “theme” choice. So you could have a hundred layers and as long as all of the “theme” icons are checked, they will all change when you edit the color. So this would solve your problem, however, the theme only works for one color. For instance, you couldn’t have one spiral “themeable” and choose red for it, then have another spiral be “themeable” and choose a different one. You can’t do that. Whatever the theme color is, everything that you have selected to use the theme will be affected by the change.

Thanks @Rator

So the current theme functionality is similar to having a variable associated to all the layers that you want to affect: you change it once and the colour for all associated layers change.

Surely you can have multiple themes on a face? Or is this not possible at present?
If so, spiral 1 and related layers can be part of theme 1 for which a colour can be set and spiral 2 and related layers are part of theme 2, for which a different colour can be set etc.

A new feature that allows the colour of a layer to be calculated from an expression would be very useful though.
I remember see a request for this in the feature request section of this forum dating back a few years; will just have to wait and see if that gets implemented some day…

At present the only way to dynamically change the colour of an object, is to duplicate the object over multiple layers (one layer per required colour) and then manipulate the visibility of the layers as required (via opacity or move the layer position on/off screen).

It’s just one theme per face. But if you set each element to a diff color, it should ramp them all differently.

Disappointing.
Facer will have to do more to convince me to subscribe to Creator Pro.
Either improve the functionality or allow pro users to recoup their subscription from sales to non-premium users.

I think the theme ability is great actually. The inability to assign multiple themes to multiple elements doesn’t seem to crop up much for me. It’d be nice yeah, but it wouldn’t keep me from wanting to use it. I usually make everything white that I want to theme, that seems to work the best.

It is not just the theme functionality that keeps me from subscribing to pro. Overall the pro functionality does not seem like a huge improvement over free.
Plus there is the feeling of having to pay to work for Facer, producing content which Facer then sells.

Improving my graphics skills will have a much greater impact on the quality of my faces than subscribing to pro :slightly_smiling_face: