Garatch

Overview

A watch face is the hardest interface brief there is: a canvas a few centimeters wide, read in under a second, on a battery budget measured in milliwatts. Garatch takes that brief seriously and answers it twelve different ways — a collection of Garmin faces that each test how much information a wrist can carry before it stops feeling calm.

The project started on my wrist. I wanted more useful data than a minimal face could show, but most dense faces felt like dashboards reduced to watch size. Designing my own made the constraint concrete: the information had to survive motion, sunlight, a quick glance, and the habits of one actual wearer.

Why it is personal software. I can evaluate a face by living with it rather than by approving a static mockup. If the heart-rate value takes too long to find during a walk, the hierarchy is wrong. If an always-on state feels too bright at night, the palette is wrong. Daily wear turns taste into feedback and gives each new face a reason to exist.

Each face is a thesis. Sixdash stacks six data rows with segmented goal bars over an oversized time display. Orbit puts your metrics in planetary rings. Blueprint renders the day as a technical drawing; telemetry as an instrument panel; atelier as a type specimen; cosmic and analog push toward ornament and tradition. The collection is the point — the same data, re-argued through typography, measurement, and hierarchy until the trade-offs are visible.

The constraints are the craft. Low-power wearable displays punish laziness: burn-in rules out static brightness, memory budgets rule out lazy rendering, and 1 Hz second hands have to be earned. Garatch faces use purpose-built bitmap type, custom icons, and hand-tuned progress segments instead of scaled-down phone UI, and each face adapts its hierarchy to round and rectangular Garmin displays rather than letterboxing one layout everywhere.

The tooling is half the project. A monorepo Makefile builds any face for any supported device and launches it in the Connect IQ simulator with one command, while annotated layout mockups pin down every coordinate before a line of Monkey C is written. A custom desktop designer companion previews compositions at device resolution, keeping the design loop out of the compile loop.

Key Achievements

• Twelve design theses — minimal, orbit, blueprint, telemetry, atelier, cosmic, analog, sixdash, metrics, and instrument-grid each argue a different answer to the same question
• Glanceable density — Time, steps, heart rate, calories, battery, temperature, and goal progress arranged so one glance is enough
• Device-aware layouts — Information hierarchy adapts across round and rectangular Garmin displays instead of letterboxing one design
• Purpose-built assets and tooling — Custom bitmap type, icons, and progress segments, plus a monorepo that builds and simulates any face on any device with one command

Technologies

Outcome

Garatch is an ongoing laboratory for designing useful interfaces at wrist scale, where every pixel, every milliwatt, and every glance matters.