Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a fact - it’s objectively harder to read.

This criticism is valid and although the clock is super cool, it’s bad design. Does that mean we shouldn’t do projects like this? No. Is it important to highlight the problems with design like this? Yes.

"Bad design" is just your opinion, not objective fact. If every clock were designed specifically for its ability to be read easily, there would only be one type of clock, with high contrast colors, perhaps in different sizes.

Good design involves trade offs. Many of those trade offs are opposing factors like form, function, cost, versatility, etc. And not all of those trade offs are worth it for everyone. E.g. adding a diamond to a watch will increase it's cost many times over and distract from reading the time. But that trade off is worth it for some people. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it bad design.

Design is rooted in reality in the sense that it must be functional. My argument is that this particular design is wholly un-functional, and that the diamonds that HN is optimizing for - fancy animations, pretty concentric circles - don't seem to have much value when you think about it. At least diamonds hold their value.

But I suppose, if one finds value in this not-quite-novel-application-of-javascript-animated SVGs, to each their own.

Good design is about how a thing works, not what it looks like. This calendar and clock does not work well - I am willing to bet my entire life's savings in a psychology study that determines the reaction time to read the date + time of this calendar/clock vs. reading high contrast numbers.

Functional trade-offs for "coolness" - I didn't read that memo in Design school, sorry.

I saw this and immediately and intuitively read the face.

It clicked like no other clock design I've ever seen.

I may be in a .001% of people who see this and truly grok it, but that's fine. I'd wear a watch again for this.

It's a hobbyist project, for delight and aesthetics

But it doesn't mean we should upvote every hobbyist project to the top of hacker news - only the useful, interesting, good ones.

Use the search, 90% of them don't get voted up. I've worked for years on things in the dustbin of popularity

Exactly, and my point it that this particular clock belongs in the 90%, not the 10%.

Vote and rank systems are fairly crude. Delight often takes precedence over depth, it's why you don't see academic papers or open access books on the front page often...

I'm open to more nuanced and sophisticated rules, I've even built a few systems and tried to gain traction. However the crude single vote implements seem to be the only ones with staying power.

I dunno, every day is a new context we could simply try again. Things can fail a dozen times and then something changes and makes it work. (For instance, on demand video, or YouTube, only took off when people had broadband and speedy enough computers to watch the video, it was probably the 20th company that tried this idea and the first to not eat shit)

I'll counterpoint you and say my eye scanned the rings out to in and since the sequence is ISO-8601, like I prefer everywhere, it was immediately intuitive and VERY satisfying.

As opposed to mentally shuffling other date formats into largest-smallest order, or (however well trained and immediate the translation may be) looking at a standard analog clock, this fits my thought process so very very well.

I've seen in another subthread mention of klokers.com... if they adapted their concentric design to this layout I would consider wearing a watch again.

The red line should be toward the left/west so you can read it as 2020 March 20th Monday 10:50:48.