Let’s move on with the rules and breaking them. In this article I collected the rules the classic clock follows when visualizing time. In that one I showed examples for breaking some rules. Now I move on and break some other rules. The goal is unchanged: with breaking the rules my intention is to create new visualizations.
Keep one hand only
We have the actual hour and the minute values to highlight — so we have two points. Why not to connect them simply with on arrow? The below example follows that idea.
This example uses Bézier curves, where the control points of the end points remain the same.
Let’s separate the two dials
On the classic clock minute and hour scales are on the same dial, meaning they are visualized on the same circle. The two scales (1–12 and 1–60) are represented on the same circle, but these are independent scales that simply share the same dial and graduation. This has a root in the history of mechanical capabilities, but there is no barrier to represent the two scales separately on two dials.
On this example the hour and minute dials are separated, their size is different and the minute dial is not a full circle.
The next example also separates the two scales. Remarkable solution even for the hands, as the hands do not move, while the two dials rotate. The shape of the hands resembles to sand glasses.
The following figure shows some other examples. On the first one the two dials are beside each other and they look like as if they were eyes on a face.
While on the next example the two scales are concentric, the dials rotate while the only one hand is static.
We could also separate the two scales and connect the two actual values with one arrow:
The following example has another logic. It gets rid off the redundancy of the hands and use only one hand. The only challenge is to create a dial where the minute value is easy to read. Here the minute scale is not a full circle as in case of the classic version, but the hour scale is big enough to show the exact minute value on the hour scale.
In the standard clock the two scales are on the same plane. Putting the scales on to independent planes covers new possibilities of representing time on different scales. The following figure shows a solution where we put the two scales to two different planes and move the planes quite far from each other: the tower clock shows only the hour and the other clock on the street with a transparent background shows the minutes, and the reader has to look at both of them to get the punctual time.
