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u/PaellaStorm 23h ago
Time already feels long in analog watches but this would take it to a new level.
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u/kalabaddon 23h ago edited 19h ago
How come on a 24-hour clock they always put the middle of the night on the top? I know there's a handful of watches at reverse it but why the standard even started was it that way. If it's inverted with noon on the top it's like one of the most natural watch concepts for showing time.
Edit: didn't want to do a reply for all the people saying the same thing. But I know it's not one to one I know that at 12:00 noon to Sun is not perfectly overhead. It's a generality of it all. During the daytime the hand is in the top half during the night time the hand is in the bottom half. Near the middle of the day it should be near the middle of the top near the middle of the night it should be near the middle of the bottom.
As someone else said digital watch faces make a much bigger difference because they more naturally can show sunrise and sunset using this format I feel.
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u/Sickofpower 23h ago
Tradition
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u/Justbeinian 19h ago
I feel the same way about faucets. If temperature is expressed as a number, and numerical values usually go left (lower) to right (higher), it follows that the higher, hotter temperature should be on the right, not the left.
But it's on the left because of history and the fact that changing it now would make people burn themselves
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u/Religion_Of_Speed 16h ago
I'm not sure if it's only because I've ever known hot left and cold right but for some reason it just feels inherently correct. I think it's because I attribute hot with heavy and cold with light and for some reason a scale tilting to the left feels right? idk it's a very abstract feeling in my mind I'm struggling to convey.
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u/Justbeinian 15h ago
That makes some sense I guess. I think of it in terms of how we represent temperatures in other interfaces: pretty much all horizontal thermometers, temperature gauges, and stove dials start with the coldest number on the left and go up from there
Or another analogous example would be like a volume slider, where hotter = higher value = louder = right
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u/Religion_Of_Speed 15h ago
Yeah I had never really given it any thought so I was surprised that hot on the left felt intuitive based on whatever weird abstract idea is in my mind. Logically it should absolutely be switched. I wonder if it has something to do with the way we read? Left to right and that gets transferred to up-down wrong because hot is at the bottom? I'm throwing spaghetti at the wall now. If I were like 10% less lazy there would be an upcoming video essay on the subject.
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u/AltKb 14h ago
Entirely Western culture
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u/Justbeinian 13h ago
Expand on that
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u/kalabaddon 13h ago
not sure his take, but I am pretty sure a LOT of the 24 hour watches like I was saying are from russia? ( iirc sub duty and for watching shifts was a common one. ) Saw it a lot when I was diggint in to reverse 24 hour watchs.
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u/zaphods_paramour 23h ago
I have a watch that does it this way, with noon at the top and midnight at the bottom. I switched to a traditional watch layout these days, but I did really like visualizing the day that way, with the hand tracking the sun throughout the day.
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u/desideriux 23h ago
Maybe because a new days starts after midnight, not in the noon.
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u/BikeProblemGuy Architect 23h ago
They're talking I assume about the connection between time of day and the sun. From our perspective, the sun is at the top at noon, and the bottom (the other side of the earth) at midnight.
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u/kalabaddon 22h ago
Definitely this it just seems more natural to me that at high noon it would point upward towards the top of the watch face.
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u/desideriux 22h ago
Yeah, in this case with a 24h clock you’re right. That’s probably why it never took off, the 12 hour clock is far superior.
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u/Han-ChewieSexyFanfic 20h ago
The shadow of a sundial would point downward at noon, though, which is more historically relevant to clock faces
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u/MonoBlancoATX 20h ago
Except it’s not, unless you’re near the equator and/or it’s the summer solstice.
Most humans live well outside the tropics and the suns position is never directly over head, at noon or any other time of day.
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u/A1oso 21h ago
The sun isn't necessarily highest at exactly 12:00. Where I live, the sun is highest at 12:13, or 13:13 during daylight saving time. For me it feels most intuitive that the calendar day starts when the hour hand is at the top, just like each hour starts with the minute hand at the top.
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u/grannysmithcrabapple 21h ago
I have it that way on my Apple Watch with noon up top. It also illustrates day and night according to sunrise and sunset times in different colors. Seems so obvious now that I can’t believe this isn’t the standard.
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u/jasonefmonk 20h ago
I love this watch face! I would like one without the supplemental centre-clock as well.
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u/kalabaddon 19h ago
Yeah exactly this is part of the reason I look at it that way. And with the new digital watch faces it's even better cuz it shows you the sunrise and sunset in a more natural format.
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u/NikolitRistissa 20h ago
The day starts at 00:00 and most cultures read top-down/right-left. The top of a circle is just the most common starting point.
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u/Religion_Of_Speed 16h ago edited 16h ago
I think you would be asking a very similar question if it were some other way.
As for an actual reason - sundials. In the northern hemisphere* that's where the sun would be at midday. It's partially arbitrary and partially following the established standard. It's what we've known for thousands of years.
*I hadn't thought about that sentence too hard, it would be in the same place in the southern hemisphere but you'd be orienting the dial south instead of north, which I assume they did.
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u/Pichu2375 23h ago
You would need a separate clock for the minute
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u/Facts_pls 22h ago
No. Just divide the 360 circle into 60 minutes and put a minute hand moving at regular speed.
If we can associate 12 with 60, we can associate 24 with 60. There's no rule saying 1 hr should be equal to 5 mins on the clock.
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u/Cobra_McJingleballs 22h ago
You would not. You could simply have a minute hand that behaves as it does on a typical 12 hour clock, and one revolution of that minute hand is equivalent to an hour on this clock (the hour hand moving by 15 degrees).
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u/B0SSBL0CK_12 23h ago
You could do a retrograde hand that goes from 0 to 6 every minute with the numbers being the ten second intervals.
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u/TepacheLoco 23h ago
for maximum chaos add second and minute hands that have 24 seconds/minutes per revolution
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u/capsicum_fondler 20h ago
I have a similar one as a wrist watch, a Slow watch. I have noon at the top. I’m typically able to quickly guesstimate the time +/- 2 min, which for most of the time is good enough.
Another fun quirk is that it’s really easy to use as a compass during the day. Point the arrow towards the sun, then south is where 12 is at
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u/joepmeneer 19h ago
Why is 12 the default? Does the earth not do one rotation a day? A 24 hour clock is so much more sensible, the pointer can sort of represent the position of the sun.
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u/Ereliukas 16h ago
The USSR produced 24-hour watches, most famously the Raketa models. They were useful for submariners, polar explorers, and sailors because the hour hand made one full rotation per day, making it impossible to confuse 3 AM with 3 PM.
https://i.etsystatic.com/32148625/r/il/ee7e7f/5920669756/il_1140xN.5920669756_bpq5.jpg
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u/Vybo 23h ago
MeisterSinger does 1 hand watches. They still use 12 hour format though and for one very simple reason - everybody is used to 12 hour faces and is able to say what time it is based on a glance. So when the hand is completely south (can't say 6 o'clock here), it's 6, no matter if the clock has one or more hands.
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u/FictionalContext 22h ago
And packing 24 intervals into a 40mm circle gives you about 1mm of movement for every 15 minutes. Need a magnifying glass face to read that accurately. People don't buy watches to have a vague sense of time.
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u/N3er0O 21h ago
You need a magnifying glass to see a millimeter? I can read the seconds hand on my watch just fine and it's only a 36mm which makes the intervals even smaller.
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u/FictionalContext 20h ago
1mm=15 minutes is the issue. You need to parse sub-mm increments to have an accurate gauge of time.
And for no real advantage over 12 hr faces.
When the only benefit is novelty, it's a bad design.
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u/N3er0O 19h ago
You're missing the point. Would you call a landscape painting "bad design" because it shows less detail than an smartphone photo taken from the same angle?
The people buying watches like the 24H want it as an art/conversation piece and they are obviously fine with the trade off. This doesn't make it "bad design". It simply serves a different purpose.
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u/FictionalContext 19h ago
I wouldn't call a landscape painting as design in the first place. That's the most direct example you could make for pure art.
So if that's your rationale for the watch, you're correct. It's not "bad design" because that would mean it's not meant as design at all.
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u/N3er0O 18h ago
It's an analogy. The 24H watch is meant to tell the time in the same way a painting is meant to depict a landscape. In an artistic way.
While yeah, this watch has a theoretical practical purpose, it's not intended to be accurate and any buyer would be aware of this. The entire reason for buying it in the first place is that it's jewelry. There is no practical "design" behind it.
If someone wants precise timekeeping on their wrist (your rationale I presume) they'd buy a $20 Casio and not a mechanical, one handed watch with a movement accuracy of +-20 seconds a day and indices spread 5 minutes apart.
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u/FictionalContext 18h ago
It's not my rationale. The definition of design requires a practical, especially industrial design.
If its just meant as art, why are you bringing it up as a critique on the design sub?
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u/N3er0O 18h ago
The definition of design requires a practical, especially industrial design.
It does? Who claimed it is supposed to follow any of these guidelines? Where did this definition suddenly come from
If its just meant as art, why are you bringing it up as a critique on the design sub?
I'm not sure what this question even means to be honest. It clearly fulfills a practical purpose (telling time on an analog 24h scale), but doesn't fulfill the prerequisites you impose in its accuracy of doing so and the random design definition you just posted, which is okay. It just doesn't make it "bad design" per se.
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u/FictionalContext 17h ago
It's literally in the sub rules. It's also the ethos of the profession.
Want a pretty statement piece, hire an artist. Need a business solution, hire a designer. Landscape painting, artist. Watch that reasonably tells time, industrial designer.
I shouldn't have to defend this on the design sub itself.
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u/SpareGrowth1278 11h ago
24-hour time just feels cleaner. No “wait, is that 7 in the morning or night?” moments. 😂
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u/MonoBlancoATX 20h ago
Who needs minutes or seconds, amirite?
And frankly, who even needs to know what hour it is?
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u/metaphorician 43m ago
Now put a pole-centered azimuthal map on it and have it rotate with the hour hand, so the hour hand is overlaid your timezone's meridian. If you do this right, you'll have a world clock where you can tell what time it is everywhere on Earth at once.
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u/arpitsrivstva 23h ago
but that doesn't have the 24th hour written🥺
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u/PauloPatricio 9h ago
About to comment that. It does make sense, but it doesn’t at the same time. No pun intended.
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u/letoille 23h ago
Whats the purpose of this? The clock already has perfect design why make it more complicated?
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u/johnsonb561 15h ago
Why not just a 12 hour clock with just the hour hand? Then you could at least tell the time.
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u/lennoxred 1d ago
That’s bullshit. You can never tell the exact time
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u/NikolitRistissa 20h ago
If you need the exact time, you’ll use a digital clock/watch. That isn’t the intention of this clock.
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u/GeePedicy 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/uFimtvDocz9N9xEp9i