Inside The Design: Why Are Watch Dials So Busy?

Consider, for a moment, the dial of a Rolex GMT-Master . A blue and red bezel emblazoned with numbers hugs its face. From the center of the dial, four uniquely shaped hands stretch outward. In the place of numerals is a series of gleaming shapes: A rectangle, circle, and triangle. The watch is far from spare – the opposite, really. And yet, you could argue that the GMT is minimalist in its own totally not-minimalist way. Admittedly, it's a bit of a contradiction: The GMT's dial is filled with stuff, but it was a remarkably efficient design when first produced. Rolex created the GMT in 1955 for Pan American Airline pilots who regularly shifted between time zones. The pilots needed a workhorse of a watch that could tell the time in two different places, while keeping track of the date and whether it was day or night. The dial's resultant visual complexity was directly related to its functionality. At the time it was designed, the GMT was as minimal as it could be, given its intended use. The modern "Pepsi" GMT-Master II is very similar to the original from 1955. Today, no one needs a watch to tell them the time halfway around the world (hello, phones). Most people don’t need a watch to count milliseconds, measure water depth, or remind them of what day it is, though they might want these complications. Watches have evolved beyond functional timepieces, but dial design has remained largely devoted to mechanical excess and ornamentation. The question is, why? As someone who approaches horology from a design standpoint, I've often found myself wondering why so many watches are filled to the brim with features. Why, in an industry predicated on craftsmanship and taste, is the default aesthetic unapologetic maximalism? Every year, watchmakers roll out new models with chronographs, date windows, astrological complications, skeleton dials, and gemstones. Sometimes it can feel like watchmakers are complicating their watches for complication's sake – an engineering and stylistic flex, if you will. It's hard to blame them. Watches are made to be sold, and no one wants to buy the same watch twice. Beholden to the consumerist churn of watch shows, holiday seasons, and balance sheet bottom lines, the lure of creating something newer, better, different, is hard to ignore. And yet, I suspect another reason many watchmakers have a fraught relationship with the concept of "lowercase-m" minimalism is the same reason many designers balk at the word when it's used to describe their work. Despite its roots in avant-garde artistic movements , minimalism is now used as a catch-all description for anything that looks pared-back and spare. It refers more to an aesthetic than it does to a design process or an artistic framework, which is a problem for serious watchmakers who want to show off serious watches. Less expensive, fashion-focused brands can get away with touting a "minimalist" style, while masking basic craftsmanship with a layer of clean-lined design. With notable exceptions (see Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo line, which is restrained but not boring) few luxury brands have figured out how to create a dial that's both simple and capable of communicating the effort and consideration that goes into making a high-end watch. Today, watches are functional art pieces, and their dials are an expression of individual taste and brand legacy. Watchmakers are beholden to principles tied to the history of their design ethos. For Zenith CEO Julien Tornare, whose brand is famous for its high-frequency chronograph movement, including a chronograph in the majority of its watches is non-negotiable. “We have several functions and complications like the 1/100th of a second chronograph, three counters, and such, so naturally the dial will be more packed,” Tornare says of the company’s recently launched Defy 21 Spectrum. The line’s other defining features include a gemstone-encrusted case and rainbow-bright PVD-coated movements that are visible through the dial's skeleton display. It is, by anyone's definition, the antithesis of restraint, and yet for Tonare, the visual cacophony serves a purpose. "We also like to show the great engineering that exists behind the dial, which is the main reason for our skeleton pieces." Zenith's new Defy Spectrum chronographs are decidedly maximalist. The Zenith watch supports my working thesis, which is that for many brands, a busy dial connotes craftsmanship. It’s one way to prove the value of an object that can exceed the cost of a car. "In the watch industry there's this historical idea that the more complex the watch looks, the higher the price tag for the brand, so they try to make things more complex than they actually are," says Edouard Meylan, CEO of provocative Swiss brand H. Moser & Cie. "That influenced an entire generation of watchmakers, and I don't think it's the right way to go." Moser's Mega Cool watches do have logos on the dials ... but only barely. Since taking over H. Moser’s business in 2013, Meylan has tried to reduce the brand down to its elemental parts. Six years ago, Moser introduced its ultra-minimalist Venturer concept watch, a $26,500 timepiece whose dial is blank, aside from two thin hands. The Venturer embraces minimalism more overtly than Moser’s standard watch lines, but all of the brand’s timepieces carry much of the same pared-back DNA. Meylan stripped every Moser dial of “Swiss Made,” and removed all text indicating the watch's function. "It’s all marketing text," he says. "It’s like putting the instruction booklet on the dial." The last remaining bit of text on the dial is Moser's logo, but even that might be on the chopping block: "We’ve asked ourselves quite a few times if we should remove it, but the brand and the community have to be ready for that." With the recently released Mega Cool, Moser's team struck a compromise between those who want to get rid of the logo and those who want to keep it. The colorful dial features the brand's signature scrawl printed in transparent enamel, which catches the light with a subtle glimmer. The transparent printing process brings Moser's watches one step closer to what Meylan believes to be the platonic ideal of horological design. "If you can create a product where the features are the signature, and there’s no logo, then you’ve won," he says. Meylan’s view of minimalism has its roots in the modernist design movement, which counts among its practitioners famous architects and designers like Mies Van Derh Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Ray and Charles Eames. Born primarily from the German design school of the Bauhaus, modernism is defined most simply by its adherence to the idea that function should influence form, and that a piece of design should be representative of the material used to make it. You can see this in the work of a designer like Dieter Rams, whose decades-long tenure as Braun's design director was marked by a steadfast practicality. Like nearly everything he designed, Rams' watches were pristine and efficient. They had a simple goal – to tell the time without fuss. With clean sans-serif numerals and blunt-edged hands, the A10 delivered on that promise. Braun's A50 took that idea a step further by getting rid of the numerals altogether. Rams' approach to design was driven by his famous mantra, "Less, but better." That attitude lent itself to a sober aesthetic, but his work was never purely about looks. "Minimalism isn't isn't an end goal, it's a result of an approach," says Jesse Reed, a co-founder of the design studio Order. "And that approach is quite simply to take away everything that is unnecessary until you're left with only what is needed to get across whatever it is you're trying to do." Braun's watches are about as classically "minimalist" as it gets. Reed, a graphic designer who has crafted pared-down logos for the likes of Hillary Clinton and dozens of companies , wears a Tibor Kalman-designed M&Co Bodoni watch and has designed a concept timepiece for Anicorn , which is to say, he very much considers himself a modernist at heart. The hardest thing about getting minimalism right, he notes, is that there’s very little room for error. Eliminating what Reed calls "visual pollution" requires a keen eye for the basics of design like proportions and negative space. “There’s a relationship between everything on the face,” he says. "Everything should be in harmony." He was drawn to Kalman's Bedoni watch for its clarity and efficiency. "There's nothing on this watch that shouldn't be there," he says. "There are minutes, there are hours, there are two hands, and then the name of the company – and one could argue maybe that's not even that important." For much of the Western world, modernism has become shorthand for "good" design. Its stoic influence is passed from generation to generation of design students, who learn that the design cannon centers around a mostly white, mostly male perspective whose work champions reduction. This ideology cuts across mediums – from graphic design to architecture to furniture design. A spare aesthetic can be a signifier of value. In book design, for example, negative space is quite literally more expensive to produce. "This is the concept of luxury margin," says Joe Doucet , a designer known for his modern take on everything from chairs to playing cards. Doucet explains that extra room on the edge of the printed page allows readers to hold onto the book without covering the text with their thumbs. "Cheap pulp novels printed text right up to the edge." When it comes to embracing minimalism, watches are a notable holdout. The industry still celebrates ornament. It can take months, years even, to design and build a watch; at the end of that painstaking process, watchmakers want to showcase their craftsmanship. Still, a pared-back dial is its own accomplishment. "It's really easy to be ornamental and to load up the dial," says Ann Kantra, senior vice president of product design at Movado. "But stripping it away and using it as a canvas for expression is a different sort of focus – it's a celebration of simplicity." Movado has made versions of the "Museum Watch" since 1947. Decades before Rams designed the A50, Movado was exploring how to push watch design to its minimalist limits. In 1949, designer and engineer Nathan George Horwitt designed the concept for Movado’s now-famous Museum Watch , whose blank black dial features only two hands and a gold dot at the 12-hour mark meant to evoke a sundial. Horwitt’s vision was to reduce timekeeping down to its most essential parts. "He wanted to explore how you could tell time without so much complexity," Kantra says. "He came up with stripping it away, and thinking about it conceptually as the dot becoming the sun and the hands becoming like the movement, tracking the movement of the Earth around the Sun." Horwitt’s design for the Museum Watch has remained largely the same over the years, aside from stylistic deviations in material, color, and shape. Over its lifetime, the watch has become an icon of minimalist horological design, even claiming a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. For minimalism acolytes, the Museum Watch’s endurance highlights one of the main benefits of a simplified approach. "When you reduce something to its absolute essence, there is a timelessness to it," Doucet says. "In many ways, it's a much more sustainable way to design because you're not designing for obsolescence. You're designing for longevity." Liz Stinson is the executive editor of   Eye on Design, published by AIGA. Her writing on design has also appeared in Wired, Curbed, Gizmodo, Architectural Digest, and   The Wall Street Journal Magazine. Illustrations by Francesco Muzzi. Shop Talk As you may know, the HODINKEE Shop is an Authorized Dealer of Bulgari and Zenith, so if you're looking to explore their current selections, don't forget to check the Shop .Across the design world, minimalism equates to luxury. In the watch world, it's the opposite.