randy ang's blog

I am the first to admit I am not a watch fan. After the whole conversion from pagers to the mobile phones, many many yonks ago, my time is told by the phone. Never liked the feeling of something on the wrist, used to wear a watch on on right hand (right-handed) and it gets in the way when I am drawing. Can't help it. Then there was the sun-tan line. So much prefer it without a watch. For some cosmic reason, I started looking at watches, learning and reading. Slowly. And I came across this, the MIH annual calender. A true beauty. The design approach got to me. Bad design is when a piece of design tries too hard and pretends to be complex with ideas from far far away. Good design is when the complexities are reduced to a simple approachable solution. Good design can be understood. Good design should be timeless.

Extract from the site :

"In line with Ludwig Oechslin’s reductionist concept, the watch is pared down to its essential elements, yet retains a crucial complication, namely, the calendar. Watches with date displays are common enough, but few are able to show the day of the week, month and date and keep track of the different numbers of days in the months. Two types of mechanical calendar are capable of this: perpetual calendars, which are built around highly complex mechanisms that go so far as to recognise irregularities such as leap years, and annual calendars, which have to be corrected once a year at the end of February to take into account that month’s occasional idiosyncrasy. Even annual calendars tend towards technical complexity, with display windows often distributed around the entire dial for constructional reasons, making them counter-intuitive to read. Ludwig Oechslin has taken this challenge head on and has come up with a design for an annual calendar that is built around just 9 moving parts (instead of the usual 30-40) – and its display is contained within one easy-to-read window."