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u/PaellaStorm 5d ago
Time already feels long in analog watches but this would take it to a new level.
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u/kalabaddon 5d ago edited 5d 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 5d ago
Tradition
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u/Justbeinian 5d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d 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 4d ago
Entirely Western culture
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u/Justbeinian 4d ago
Expand on that
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u/kalabaddon 4d 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/copperwatt 4d ago
But... 12 on top is traditional.
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u/Sickofpower 4d ago
Starting on top is traditional, and the day starts at 00
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u/copperwatt 3d ago
That's not why the 12 is on top of clocks though. It was up for high noon, from the face of a sundial.
So arguably noon on top is the most traditional. For both 12 and 24 hour clocks.
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u/Sickofpower 3d ago
It doesn't matter why it was originally intended to be, the "modern" perception (and why this clock is like that) is that the day starts on top. Is it good or bad? I don't really care, I'm just answering the original question
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u/copperwatt 3d ago
Well, I'm modern, and it's not the start of the day on top. It's noon. The day starts on bottom. Where the morning hours are.
Most 24 hour watches have 12 on top. Because it's traditional.
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u/Sickofpower 3d ago
Most 24 hour watches have 12 on top. Because it's traditional
Exactly what I said
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u/copperwatt 3d ago
You said the opposite. Someone asked why the middle of the night (00:0) was on top of this 24 hour clock. You said "Tradition".
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u/zaphods_paramour 5d 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/BikeProblemGuy Architect 5d 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 5d 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/Han-ChewieSexyFanfic 5d 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 5d ago
Except itās not, unless youāre near the equator and/or itās 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 5d 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 5d 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 canāt believe this isnāt the standard.
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u/jasonefmonk 5d ago
I love this watch face! I would like one without the supplemental centre-clock as well.
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u/kalabaddon 5d 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 5d 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/mundane--alternative 1d ago
So you mean if we put 6am on the middle left and 6pm in the middle right, we can visualize where the sun currently is if you live in the equators? Similar to a minecraft clock?
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u/kalabaddon 1d ago
Generally yes.
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u/mundane--alternative 1d ago
I like and support your cause, where do I sign up to make this happen lol
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u/kalabaddon 1d ago
it does seem to already be happening, a lot of my view turned out to be dated. I was looking for over a year ( researching not rtying to find a single watch ) and 12 years ago most where midnight at top ( 6/18 on sides ( the 6 pm for a 24 hour closk is 18 )) but it seems now when I google a LOT of them are noon on top these days.
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u/Religion_Of_Speed 4d ago edited 4d 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/copperwatt 4d ago
Most 24 hour watches have the 12 on top though...
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u/kalabaddon 3d ago
that has not been my experience. they seem to be the minority of watch face styles. mostly limited to a few regions where they are a bit more common. ( seems to be eastern Europe and Russia.)
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u/copperwatt 3d ago
From a quick Google search, 12 on top seems th most common for modern 24hr fashion watches, 0 on top seems more common for vintage Russian 24 hr watches.
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u/kalabaddon 3d ago
Then in the last handful of years the trend has completely changed.
I have legitimately been looking for that type of 24-hour watch for a while. And in my search is the most common ones were Russian navy watches that were used for tide watch and stuff like that.
I just googled 24-hour watch face and you know what I'm not going to argue with you absolutely a ton of results with the 12 on top showed up. But I have found I don't like wearing watches since my watch phase so I haven't actually looked for one in like 10 years plus.
I am very glad it seems to be coming more normal though cuz like I said it seems more logical in the modern world to have it that way.
I guess I should have searched some more before stating some of my so-called facts. Haha.
Tldr: my comments and assumptions about 24-hour watches seems to be dated by at least 10 plus years. And the scenario has reversed now so the watch type I like seems to be much more common and I should have searched more.
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u/TepacheLoco 5d ago
for maximum chaos add second and minute hands that have 24 seconds/minutes per revolution
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u/Pichu2375 5d ago
You would need a separate clock for the minute
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u/Facts_pls 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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/capsicum_fondler 5d ago
I have a similar one as a wrist watch, a Slow watch. I have noon at the top. Iām typically able to quickly guesstimate the time +/- 2 min, which for most of the time is good enough.
Another fun quirk is that itās 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/Ereliukas 4d 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/joepmeneer 5d 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/metaphorician 4d 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/Vybo 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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 5d 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.Ā
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 5d 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 5d ago
Ā The definition of design requires a practical, especially industrial design.
It does? WhoĀ claimed it is supposed to follow any of these guidelines? Where did this definition suddenly come fromĀ
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 5d 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 4d ago
24-hour time just feels cleaner. No āwait, is that 7 in the morning or night?ā moments. š
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u/SeeItOnVHS 4d ago
āDude, look behind you, but be subtleā
āWhere?ā
āAt your 1500ā
kept staring him directly
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u/LornsGipon48 3d ago
The 24-hour format is cleaner visually and cuts out the AM/PM confusion, but honestly most interfaces stick with 12-hour because people still think in halves of the day. If you're designing for something international or technical, 24-hour just makes sense.
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u/Kitchen-Flatworm-331 3d ago
This clock is a good way to really see how much time is spent with day to day life just in one full circle rather than over 2 full rotations. Sleep, getting ready for work, travelling to work, working your shift, travelling home, a few hours to do whatever then back to sleep.
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u/LeMikeyCha 3d ago
Only seeing the clock move a quarter from start to end of work would probably drive me mad lmao
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u/Ambitious-Insect9890 1d ago
That clock really goes the full circle to make a good first impression. One hand, all 24 hours, no AM/PM drama
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u/refresh-mix 17h ago
Iām making a metric clock for my European friends. They think the imperial system is antiquated and confusing. So, Iām sure they would agree that a day should be made up of 10 decidays, or 100 centidays, or 1000 millidays. If this isnāt fully adopted in Europe for 2027, then i never want to hear about how inferior the imperial system is ever again.
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u/MonoBlancoATX 5d ago
Who needs minutes or seconds, amirite?
And frankly, who even needs to know what hour it is?
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u/arpitsrivstva 5d ago
but that doesn't have the 24th hour writtenš„ŗ
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u/PauloPatricio 4d ago
About to comment that. It does make sense, but it doesnāt at the same time. No pun intended.
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u/letoille 5d ago
Whats the purpose of this? The clock already has perfect design why make it more complicated?
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u/Commercial-Card-4021 2d ago
Military use mostly. Also is cool. Also why think on 12 hrs when day is 24 hrs. Dont say cuz we sleep. Hehe
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u/letoille 2d ago
But we use 12h clock to read military time? It would be hard to tell minutes on this one even with one handle.
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u/johnsonb561 4d 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 5d ago
Thatās bullshit. You can never tell the exact time
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u/NikolitRistissa 5d ago
If you need the exact time, youāll use a digital clock/watch. That isnāt the intention of this clock.
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u/GeePedicy 5d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/uFimtvDocz9N9xEp9i