A clock is the one thing on a screen you look at all day without really meaning to. You glance at it between emails, over the top of a book, across the room from the sofa. So it seemed strange that most clocks on screens look the same: plain digits, plain background, nothing to enjoy.
The flip clock on Prakash Collective started from a simple question. If people are going to look at this a hundred times a day, how should it feel?
One clock, many rooms
The answer turned out to be different for different rooms, so the clock has ten styles. Each one is built for a place and a mood.
- For the TV or a big screen: Noir is the classic, black cards and white numbers, easy on the eyes in a dark room. Signal fills the screen with just two giant flaps, edge to edge, so you can read it from across the room.
- For people who love travel: Departures copies the big split-flap boards from airports and train stations. Every flap runs through the characters in order to reach the next one, the way the real boards did, which is where that famous clatter came from.
- For calm study and work: Monsoon puts frosted glass cards over a rainy night, slow and quiet enough to leave on for hours. Daylight sits over a sky that follows the real time of day: soft pink in the morning, bright blue at noon, orange in the evening and deep blue with a moon at night.
- For a bit of nostalgia: Desk is a tear-off desk calendar. Pocket is drawn like the screen of an old handheld game, with chunky pixel numbers and a blinking PRESS START. Studio draws the clock as a real object, a white radio clock with a speaker grille and an orange button.
- For reading the time like a sentence: Words writes it out, like IT'S TEN FIFTY-TWO IN THE MORNING, and each word flips over when it changes.
- Just for fun: Sorbet is bouncy pastel tiles.
The small things
Most of the work went into details you might only notice after a while:
- The flip itself. Every number drops over like a real card, top half first, then the bottom. You can turn on a soft flip sound, too.
- Full screen with one key. Press F for full screen and the clock is all you see, which is the whole point on a spare monitor or a tablet on a shelf.
- It keeps going. Leave it running all day and it just carries on, in your own local time.
- Nothing to install. It runs in a browser tab on a computer, a tablet or a phone.
Pick your mood
There's no right style, only the one that suits where you are right now. Try Noir on a TV tonight, Monsoon for a study session, or Departures if you miss airports.