A technological charm

When it launched in 2015, Pebble Time was the world’s strongest and thinnest smart watch, and easily the most user-friendly. We developed a weird and fun universe of icons for it, making it the most charming as well.

Scaled to fit

E-paper screens have tremendous advantages in their thinness, sunlight readability and battery life, but have limitations in resolution density. This means that rendering graphics well can be tricky. To account for this, we had to create an illustration system that produced good results on the screen, while being flexible enough to let us create every graphic we would need.

The rendering challenges boil down to getting the anti-aliasing right. We adjusted all the vector angles to make sure every pixel would render satisfactory. No half-baked pixel perfection. No bezier curves. Just straight, quirky lines.

Another challenge is that scaling artwork won’t cut it at this size and resolution. In order to make the icons work in various places of the Pebble OS, they had to be drawn manually in three different sizes, each with their own degree of detailing.