Let’s break the rules of the classic clock 1.

The most exciting thing ever is to break the rules. But breaking the rules has sense only if we create something new.

In my previous article I listed the rules a classic clock follows. It has to be clarified what I mean by “classic clock” as there are really thousands and thousands of clocks with different style and color and size. What can be taken as “classic”? Well, classic in this context means typical and not modern at the same time. Typical in the sense that those rules which describe the most clocks can be taken as classic: there is one dial, which is a circle, there are two or three hands that point to the Now value, and so on. Most of the rules are true for almost all of the clocks. However, in the modern world we are already used to a modern clock style, where there are only a few numbers, the hands might look less an arrow and more just a simple line, and the backgrounds are really variegated. More simply: put the clockface of a clock from an old and a modern railway station beside each other, and you’ll see that most of the features did not change over the years — classic is what kept unchanged.

Two clocks from railway station. The style has changed, but the visualization rules are the same. Left: The clock in Musée D’Orsay which used to be a trailway station. Right: The clock in a modern railway station in Liège.

Next I’ll show that if we break the rules of the classic clock, we’ll get more or less creative solutions.

Let’s replace numbers first

Rule: there are graduations and numbers around the dial marking the possible values of hours, minutes and seconds.

We learn the classic clock’s rules when we are little kids and we read the clock couple of times each day during our entire lives. We get such a strong clock reading routine so that we can read the actual time from a clock even if it uses some awkward signs instead of numbers like in the following examples. Even if you can not read Morse signs or don’t have time to calculate those equations, you can still without problem read the time from these clocks.

Clocks where numbers are replaced with signs — they are still easily readable.

And if there are no numbers at all on the clockface we can still manage to read it. There is one thing to mind: a reference point should be given, eg. the 12:00 point, which is not a problem in case of a wrist watch or in case of a clock on the wall. But I can only hope that no one rotated the desk clock on the right by accident and it is really 13:50 and not 17:05 or 22:35.

Clocks without numbers or signs. Be careful not to roll over the desk clock on the right.

Role of the hands

Rule: The hands of the classic clock point to the actual hour and minute Now values on the dial from the center of the circle radially, from the inside out. They share their axis, their only fixed point, which is their starting point.

Let’s play a little bit with this. What if the hands do not begin from the center of the dial? What if their pointing direction is not from the inside out? Or if they are still pointing without looking like classic clock hands?

Hands still pointing, with some unusual solutions.

And we can continue this by thinking how it is possible to point the actual values without using radial hands? This example is a tricky one, it does not use radial hands, but these are still hands.

Hands that look strange. Basically they are still hands that point to the actual Now values.

But what is the role of the hands anyway? It used to be to point to the actual values with an arrow which points from the middle of the circle to a point on the circle line. This is the classic hand what we see on the classic clock.

Pointing to a value however means that the given value is highlighted somehow.

Are there any other ways to highlight a value other than pointing to it? According to the following examples, yes, there are other solutions for that.

The below example completely gets rid off the classic hand logic: there are two “snakes” going around the circle and the head of the snakes point to the actual hour and minute values.

Hands that are not pointing radially, but they are going around the circle

The next one is using magnifiers to make the actual value more readable. The other example is doing the job by using a little ball the user can even touch making it usable for people with visual impairment.

Showing is highlighting

Another solution for highlighting in a creative way is the Chromatograph where the actual hour is shown by a gap on the rotating black circle, making it a „negative hand”.

“Negative” hand

There are million ways an actual Now value can be highlighted. You could use color, font or shapes, and so on. In the below example I’ve chosen shapes that are going around and show the Now values.

Shapes showing the actual Now values

We have just broke the first few rules of the classic clock: the rule that there are always numbers around the dial, and the rule that the hands are arrows pointing from the middle of the circle to a value on the circle.

These rules were easy to identify and easy to break, kind of top of the surface rules. We will go deeper…

To be continued..