[Watchmaking] EP.3 Designing watch dial

Now it's time to design the watch dial.


You'll need to work with a vector editor tool like Adobe Illustrator to order the sheet metal laser cuts for the dial base, or to order pad printing plates. I used Adobe Illustrator.


Since I had no previous design experience, I learned how to use Illustrator from by doing some search on YouTube and Google. In particular, the 1:30 minute YouTube video below explains how to draw and duplicate the most important part, index(markers). You don't need to know all of Illustrator's features to design a watch dial; you can always do a quick YouTube or Google search to learn how to use the features you need.



Here are some additional tips

Guidelines

When designing a watch dial, you need to consider the Visible Area and the length of the hour and minute hands. (See EP.1 for more information on Visible Area.) Drawing them out in the form of guidelines will help you a lot when designing the dial. I used different colors to make the guidelines stand out.


Layers

It should go without saying, but you should separate each element of your dial design into layers. Once the design is finalized, you'll need to create and send separate files for ordering the metal plate for the watch base and the pad printing plate, which can be a pain if you don't separate them into layers.



Once you have a draft of your design, you can match colors, change fonts, and more to perfect your design.

Now let's order sheet metal laser cuts!!

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