About
A bench for designing a watch that has no hands. Instead of hands it has discs — square pieces of artwork stacked on top of each other, each turning at its own speed. One turns once an hour, one once every twelve, and up to two more sit still. You tell the time by where the artwork has got to.
You can run it against the real clock, or drag the slider to scrub a whole day from midnight to midnight and watch the discs pass over one another. Any layer can be switched from an opaque print to a tinted acrylic disc, where the colours multiply the way light really does through stacked filters.
Your artwork never leaves your browser
Nothing you add here is uploaded. Not to this site, not to anyone. There is no server to upload it to.
This is a site made of static files. When you drop a PNG or an SVG onto a layer, your browser reads the file off your own disk, keeps it in memory as text, and saves it in that browser's local storage. No request carrying your artwork is ever made, because there is nothing at the other end to receive one. There are no accounts, no analytics, no cookies, and no third-party scripts, fonts or trackers of any kind — the page makes no external requests at all.
That cuts both ways, and it is worth knowing what you are giving up:
- Only you can see your design. Nobody else, the author of this site included, can see what you have added.
- It stays in one browser. It will not follow you to your phone, to another browser, or to another computer.
- You cannot share a design with a link. The address bar carries only the time you have scrubbed to, never the artwork.
- Clearing your site data erases it. So does a private window once you close it. Keep your original files.
- There is about 3 MB of room. That is the browser's limit, shared across every layer. The meter under the layer list shows what is left, and warns you before a change is too big to keep.
If you want the shipped design back at any point, Reset to defaults restores it and clears what you had added.
Preparing artwork
Each layer is a square image, 1200 × 1200 px, that covers the whole face: the circle inscribed in your square is the dial, edge to edge. The centre of the image is the pivot a turning disc spins about, and whatever sits at the top of it points at twelve o'clock. Give everything but the bottom layer a transparent background. The full notes are under How to prepare the artwork on the bench itself.
Contact
Questions, bugs, or a watch you have made and want to show me:
Made by Wu Wave Interaktiv.