A half language clock which shows time difference between Australia and China.
Theme: Play & Time
Context:
I have to say this theme is really great to design a game. Lots of ideas came into my brain but finally I decided to try something that I can get fun from producing. I looked some wall clock design works in past few weeks and I already have interesting on designing a clock before I got this theme. I believed that I will enjoy on clock designing and in fact I did.
One of my inspiration comes from a picture in pinterest and its orgin link is
https://aroundthekampfire.com/2018/02/teaching-kids-tell-time-past-the-hour.html.
I put the picture in this post as well. This idea inspires me that the hour hand can points to multiple times.
As a person from other country, the time difference always annoy me. There always two clocks in my daily life. My phone use time of Australia and my desktop use time of China. Sometimes I confuse those clocks and make mistakes. So I decided to design a clock which shows time of both Australia and China.
Method:
I used Photoshop to :
1. draw all materials of whole clock.
2. make a wall clock version.
3. combine the wall clock with the wall of my home.
Then I used Unity to simulate the clock
Response:
At the beginning of the work, I just drew a circle and put Arabic numerals on it.
Hour hand:
To quickest identify the country, I used text as hour hand and I bended them because straight text looks commonly. There's 3 hours difference between Australia and China, so the hour hand which shows different time must be a long word. Australia is enough long and the letter "A" can be used to point the time. At my first work, "Australia" was bended to outside which looks like a sickle so that to top of "A" can points to number. But this made the "Australia" too big and it has very bad looking. So I have to bend it to inside like now. Because of that, I found there's a great angel between "Australia" and "China" which makes them sharing the last letter "a". If I want make this becomes a really clock, I have to connect each letter and this "a" plays the bridge.
AM and PM:
I realised that I need something to notice the time is morning or afternoon after I finished all hands. So I drew a wheel with half of moon and half with sun. With the time passing, moon fall down and sun raise up.
Change the Arabic numerals:
I put this clock on my wall by using Photoshop and I found it is very strange because the text hands not suitable with arabic numerals. I tried some changes on this like rotating the number, change the layout to asymmetry... but all of them are not satisfying me. Finally an idea came into my brain - There's two countries on my clock, why don't put the language of these countries to represent time? So I used capital Chinese number and English number to repalce arabic numerals. Because they take more spaces, I removed ticks on clock.
Simulate by Unity:
A stop clock isn't fun. So I put all resources into Unity and make the clock moving. While the clock goes too slow to debug, I have to creat a speed scaler to accelerate the time. After that, I found it is so fun to change to speed and played a few time on changing the speed. I want to keep my old version as well, so I created some buttons to swap the scene and change the numbers on clock.
Reflection:
The "PLAY" in this week is being fun. There's no playful game, no rules and no plan. I just want try something I never did, work on something that gives me fun and enjoy it. Even the final result is not playful but I did spent few minutes on moving the time scaler left and right, watching the second hand goes to crazy and backed to calm and laughing.
The "TIME" is about what you can do to this clock - boost or slow down the speed of time or even backward the time. Watch the clock and feel the time passing (Well, the time does passing).
By Sdust
Email Sdust
Published On: 16/03/2020