Atelier Watch.Four watches, drawn in code, on your Home Screen and your nightstand.

A collection is not a colour scheme. It is a different shape of watch — a different bezel, a different marker layout, a different hand profile — which is why each one has to be drawn rather than tinted.

• 

  Dress Free

  Clous de Paris bezel, applied batons doubled at twelve, dauphine hands. All nine finishes, both dial widgets, every size.

• 

  Diver Pro

  A rotating 60-minute bezel graduated minute by minute through the first quarter-hour, a luminous pip at zero, sword hands.

• 

  Pilot Pro

  A thin bezel and a matte dial, large numerals, and the triangle with two dots at twelve that lets you find the top in the dark.

• 

  GMT Pro

  A fixed day/night bezel and a fourth hand reading a second zone on the 24-hour scale. Pick the city; the hand follows it.

There is no seconds hand, and no chronograph. A widget's timeline carries one entry per minute, so a seconds hand would sit visibly frozen — and a stopped hand does not read as a style, it reads as broken. A chronograph is built around sub-dials that a running seconds hand drives; without it they are three dead circles. So every collection here is one that works honestly with two hands. Removing things to keep the rest true has been most of this project.

The dials were finished and wrong. Every element sat in the right place, and the result looked like a drawing of a watch — because every ring had its own gradient, and no two of them agreed about where the light was.

• −135°
  one source

  The light

  Every gradient on every collection now derives from a single angle held in one constant. Each piece had been shaded to look good alone, and the result was a collage — objects that had never been in the same room. This page is lit from the same angle: every shadow here falls the same way the dial's does.

• 23 / 255
  peak 177

  The polished flange

  It reads as brilliant, so it had been drawn bright. Measuring photographs said the opposite: its median brightness is about 23 out of 255, with a narrow peak of 177. It is a dark ring with one fierce highlight. What the eye reads as polish is not brightness — it is the rate of change from black to white across a short distance.

• 0.185 r
  bezel

  The dive bezel

  Nearly a quarter of the radius. At the width it started with, the 60-minute scale could not sit on it with any dignity and the ring read as a line rather than as part of the case. The pilot's is 0.078 — thin, because on that watch the dial is the whole point.

• no flank
  on purpose

  What is not drawn

  There is no metal case wall around the bezel. It looks like free depth and it is wrong: a wall reads as the side of a cylinder seen at an angle, and that contradicts the viewpoint of everything else, which is from directly overhead. The shadow the watch casts lifts it off the surface without claiming anything about where you are standing. Depth cues have to agree or they cancel.

A dial is not a background. It is a surface with a finish, and a finish is a decision about how light leaves it — which is why this one is drawn rather than photographed, and why it changes as you turn it.

• IIII
  not IV

  The four

  Watch and clock dials have printed IIII almost without exception for centuries: it balances the VIII opposite it and divides the dial into three even zones. This one had IV. It costs nothing to get right and everything to get wrong, because the people most likely to enjoy this are exactly the people who see it immediately.

• two lobes
  ⟂ to source

  The sunburst

  260 fine rays at even intensity produce a symmetrical bright ring, and an even ring is the thing that most gives away a drawn dial. A radially brushed surface returns light in two opposing wings, on the axis perpendicular to the source, and falls almost quiet between them. One envelope term, derived from the same light angle as everything else.

• domed
  not flat

  The curvature

  A curved dial is not brightest at its centre; it is brightest in the zone facing the light. Nudging the radial gradient's centre toward the source is the whole difference between a surface and a flat disc. The pilot's dial is the deliberate exception — matte and flat, because curvature works against the only thing that dial is for.

• gilt
  gold first

  The printing

  Gloss black lacquer with gold printing, from the era when the text was laid down in gold before the black went over it. The minute track is gilt; the numerals are applied metal. Different materials, so they catch the light differently — which is only visible because they are lit by the same source.

A date window is a complication, and so are the moon phase and the second time zone. Lume is not — it is a material. The app keeps that distinction because the people who build watches here already make it.

• synodic
  no network

  The moon phase

  Computed from the synodic month in arithmetic, at six o'clock where it belongs. No location request and no network call — which is what lets a complication that usually justifies asking for both sit inside an app that collects nothing at all.

• cream
  in daylight

  The lume

  Luminous material does not glow in daylight. In every reference photograph it is a pale cream ceramic with barely a hint of colour; the saturated green everyone pictures is what it emits in the dark. Painting it in its night colour was the single mistake that most loudly announced the dial had been drawn. Five materials, and Aged Radium stays caramel in daylight the way aged tritium does.

• ~600 zones
  91 cities

  The second zone

  The GMT hand reads any IANA zone on the 24-hour scale, and the Dual Time widget puts two dials side by side with each city named beneath it. Each dial runs on its own calendar, so the same instant is drawn in each city's local hour — and a badge marks a city already on tomorrow.

• dim red
  StandBy

  The night

  On the nightstand, when the system strips the widget's background and shows it full-width on black, the dial turns a dim red. Red is the colour that interferes least with dark adaptation. It is a setting of the device rather than of the watch, so it covers every Atelier widget in StandBy and leaves the Home Screen alone.

Below twelve is where the maker's name goes on a real dial. On yours it holds whatever you put there — and then the watch is finished, and it is yours rather than one of nine finishes.

• hands
  must reach

  The rule about length

  The minute hand's tip has to touch the minute track, and the hour hand's has to reach the inner edge of the markers. It is what watchmakers hold to and what enthusiasts complain about most on real watches. All four collections were short. The lengths are now derived from the marker and track geometry rather than chosen by eye, and tests fail the build if a change to the markers quietly breaks them.

• every size
  every model

  The audit

  The engraving is drawn at every size any iPhone renders a dial at, swept continuously and compared pixel by pixel against the same dial without it. That test exists because a size threshold once hid the engraving on the most common widget of all, and nothing about the dial looked wrong — one small detail was simply, silently absent.

• drop it
  than fake it

  Ornament that knows its size

  At Large the dive bezel shows its 10/20/30/40/50 numerals and all sixty graduations. Below a threshold they go, because at four points they are a smudge rather than information. The same applies to the depth rating and the moon aperture. A detail rendered illegibly is worse than a detail left out.

The watch you build in the app is the watch your widgets wear. Build it once, place a widget, and it follows every change you make afterwards.

• Free

  The dress collection, in full

  All nine finishes, both dial widgets, every widget size, the Lock Screen in three shapes, and StandBy. Not a trial and not a watermark — the whole collection.

• $7.99 once

  Atelier Pro

  The Diver, Pilot and GMT collections and every collection added later; the complications — moon phase, engraving, the five lume materials and StandBy night mode; and the Dual Time widget. One payment, restorable, no subscription and no advertising.

• Always

  Nothing leaves the phone

  No accounts, no analytics, no network access at all. The moon phase is computed rather than fetched, so not even a location is asked for. The app's privacy manifest is empty because there is nothing to declare.