I finally got my nike+ series 4 on tuesday and i spent forever fiddling around with complications and designs for various watch faces. The watch faces I’ve tried are infograph, modular, infograph modular, photo, timelapse, astronomy, motion, vapor, water, siri, and solar.
My conclusion is that most of these current watch faces are really not that great.
Infograph is horrendous by default—it can look pretty good paired down, but I prefer digital time over analog anyways.
Modular and its infograph variant are very bland and not particular customizable. Photo and timelapse both are pretty decent but aren’t particularly interactive—they have very little depth to them.
Astronomy is cool; I just think neither Moon, Earth, or the Solar System display options have the kind of particular facially attractive quality in them that I look for; Motion is much the same.
Vapor and Water are super cool—absolutely gorgeous; I just can’t read their analog readout efficiently enough. A shame; if they provided a digital readout for these faces, I’d be all over them.
Siri has an attractive color scheme and digital readout, (I’ve noticed that the newer digital watch faces have a much nicer, bold styling to them when compared to the ‘legacy’ digital faces) but it’s a bit cluttered and claustrophobic, if that makes sense.
That leads me to Solar, my current favorite face. While Solar is a bit too minimal, it has this very cool interactive and dynamic quality to it—it’s minimalist, stark nature is pretty effectively curtailed with cool animating and shifting style. My main problem with Solar is how difficult it is to hit the touch target for the two complications—even more so than the other watch faces with this complication layout. It’s frustrating.
But yeah, my conclusion over the past day and a half of owning an Apple Watch is that the watch face and complication selection is frustratingly limited and inconsistent design and customization-wise. They really need to go through and rethink the whole gallery in watchOS 6.