Oh I love these! It just reminded me of a small project I had in which I was creating experimental watchfaces using SVGs and JavaScript, this is before the AI boom so I made all of these by hand and, although there's nothing impressive here, I'm proud of them as a designer who learned basic code by myself.

https://watchface.netlify.app/

And I wrote about it here: https://72mena.medium.com/designing-watch-faces-using-svgs-a...

At this point it'd be worth creating an old-school webring [1] for all the HN clock enthusiasts. :)

The clock at: https://clocks.dev/clock/lock-screen

is kind of similar to one of my clocks: the Filling Digit clock [2], which fills the hollow digits with water from the bottom up to represent the seconds in a minute:

Another one that made the rounds here on HN was "Alphabetical Clock" [3] which is pretty amusing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

[2] - https://clocks.specr.net/filling-digits

[3] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571401

Some of these seem subtly off. For example, on the orange "number field" clock (https://clocks.dev/clock/number-field), you can't distinguish between 12:10 and 10:12. On the "word field" one (https://clocks.dev/clock/word-field), there are "X"es in lieu of unused characters, which makes the emergence of words a lot less mystifying than in the original "word clock" design this is based on. The "temporal exposure" one (https://clocks.dev/clock/temporal-exposure) has weird off-center bands in the blurred area. The "figure hands" one has text sticking out of the drawing area, etc.

I think the one you are calling "figure hands"... if you mean the one where hands are numbers could just use better styling overall. Two colors, different sizes, better choice of font.

They have names in their URLs when you click. I meant this one: https://clocks.dev/clock/figure-hands

Around :15 and :45, the minute arrow is sticking outside the drawing region.

yeah, that's the one. Yep it doesn't seem as intended.

Not a single 24-hour analogue face? That unexpectedly turned into one of the best reasons I keep carrying my smartwatch.

The nice thing is that anyone can easily add such design.

Create a simple 24-hour analogue face just now: https://clocks.dev/clock/c4a0aef0c379

I'd really like an analog watch face for the lock screen of my iPhone.

"Number field" felt like the best spacial representation of a numeric clock (would need to be 24h to be perfect but that's a small tweak)

There are plenty of them in a more linear style, but the 12 columns design really works well IMHO. It's really easy to roughly guess the time at a glance.

https://clocks.dev/clock/number-field

What would be the best device to put any of these ones over the desk? And old phone? Maybe an esp32?

It might not be for everyone, but sticking ones active phone on a qi2/magsafe stand is great IMHO.

Time and notifications are on one place, so they're only noticed when you're trying to plan or organize your work. Switching to timer mode is seamless.

The desk is also less cluttered thanks to the verticality of it, and the phone stays visible from afar when taking small breaks, so you don't mind leaving it there.

I've seen and used some variations of these in my Pebble watch.

They're cool for one day or two. But, in the end, I will always go back to some boring but more information-dense one (with battery charge, weather, heart rate, steps, etc).