Designing a Personal Pebble Watchface

By Jonas Hietala | Published: June 26, 2026

I recently acquired a Pebble Time 2. My motivation was simple: I wanted a smartwatch experience that existed outside the ecosystems of Google, Apple, or Samsung, specifically one that offered a robust battery life of roughly 4 weeks.

However, I discovered that creating a custom watchface tailored to my specific needs required significantly more effort than I had initially expected. There is a surprising amount of intentionality behind the features I implemented, which prompted me to document the process.

Note on Battery: While the advertised life is 30 days, my real-world experience is closer to $\approx 2$ weeks (with heart rate monitoring disabled).

The Catalyst: Addressing Personal Struggles

It is difficult to articulate the challenges I've faced over the last six months. It began as a "normal depression"—though using that term already implies a certain level of severity—but it evolved into a state where the "volume" of my life felt turned up too high. Issues that were previously manageable suddenly became overwhelming.

I have always struggled with initiating boring tasks or chores, but recently, it felt like $\text{effort} = \text{swimming through quicksand}$ .

The Symptoms of Time Blindness

Hyperfocus: I could start a project and the entire day would vanish.
Neglect: I would spend 8 hours at a computer without a single break.
Physical Neglect: I'd only realize I needed to eat or use the restroom when interrupted by picking up my children from school.
Rumination: I would spend my evenings obsessing over these failures, which hindered my ability to sleep.

Consequently, my time management collapsed, leading to the first missed appointments of my life. While a watchface isn't a cure, I felt desperate for any tool that might help.

Project Objectives

Provide a high-level overview of the daily calendar.
~~Name the project "ADHD hero"~~ (Too on-the-nose; I am currently awaiting a formal diagnosis, and I don't want to treat a severe struggle as a "cool" trend).
Reduce daily friction.
Minimize personal anxiety.

A Private Tool for a Private User

While I generally support the open-source movement, I have no intention of publishing this watchface. The goal is to eliminate friction, not create a new source of stress. By keeping it private, I can:

Modify it on a whim.
Rewrite the codebase without apology.
"Pollute" the design with personal vibes.
Focus on sufficiency rather than perfection for a public audience.

If you are interested, I encourage you to "steal" these concepts and build your own; the Pebble platform makes this quite accessible.

The Prototyping Phase with Claude

I believe strongly in rapid iteration. I used Claude to generate HTML prototypes, which allowed me to visualize concepts quickly.

While Claude's innate "taste" and creativity can be hit-or-miss, I found success by asking it to generate dozens of variations of a single concept and iterating from there.

Interactive Simulation

Claude even produced an interactive widget to simulate the watchface's logic:

These prototypes were directional. For instance, the interactive widget had rendering artifacts that were cleaned up in the final C-code implementation.

Evolution of Visual Style

The design process began before I even touched the hardware.

Iteration	Style	Feel	Result
v1	Clean & Uniform	Consistent, minimalist	$\text{Boring}$
v2	Comic Book	Thick lines, bright colors, irregular	$\text{Engaging}$

I was inspired by the Comic Drop watchface. I initially imagined a layout with pixel art—a computer icon for work hours, a barbell for gym time—but that exceeded my current artistic skills. Instead, I pivoted to a "comic book" aesthetic with bold irregularities.

This style is more visually stimulating, which is critical because it keeps my interest.

Key Feature: The Calendar Overview

I wanted a way to glance at my wrist and immediately understand my schedule. I drew inspiration from Sectograph, which uses the analog clock face to visualize time blocks.

The Logic: If an event occurs between $T_1$ and $T_2$ , the corresponding wedge of the clock is colorized.

Design Choice: I intentionally omitted text descriptions of events. For my specific needs, the content of the event is less important than the binary fact: "Is there an event happening right now?"

Combating Cognitive Filtering

My brain is exceptionally efficient at filtering out static or predictable information. I've tried using phone widgets for Calendar, Habitica, and Todoist, but eventually, my mind simply stopped "seeing" them.

To prevent this "banner blindness," I embraced non-uniformity. By making the watchface visually irregular and dynamic, I force my brain to actually process the information rather than ignoring it as background noise.