Jonas Hietala bought a Pebble Time 2 because he wanted a smartwatch that stayed away from the usual giants. Four weeks of battery life sounded perfect. What he needed, though, went far beyond telling time. He set out to craft a single watchface tuned exactly to his struggles with focus, tasks and a calendar that kept slipping away.
The result took far more work than expected. Hietala poured thought into every visual choice, every interaction, every compromise. His blog post lays bare the process in remarkable detail. Jonas Hietala’s blog shows prototypes, explains failed ideas and reveals a deeply personal motivation.
Short version: the watchface exists for one person. Hietala has no plans to publish it. He encourages others to borrow concepts and make their own. The Pebble platform makes that straightforward, he notes. Yet this one stays private. Its only job is to reduce friction in his daily life. Anything more would add anxiety he doesn’t need.
The personal problems a watch might actually address
Hietala describes six difficult months. A period of burnout gave way to something heavier. Everyday chores felt like swimming through quicksand. Hyperfocus hit harder than ever. He could sit at his computer for eight hours straight, miss meals, ignore his bladder and lose entire days. Appointments started to slip. Sleep suffered because his mind refused to shut off.
A watchface cannot fix any of that. He admits it freely. Still, he wanted three concrete things from the device on his wrist. An at-a-glance view of the day’s calendar. Help getting started on tasks. And alerts that actually forced him to break hyperfocus sessions.
He nearly named the face “ADHD hero.” That felt too on the nose. An investigation into possible ADHD continues, but diagnoses take time. So he kept the scope narrow. The watchface would serve him alone.
This decision shaped everything that followed. No need to polish for strangers. He could iterate wildly, add odd personal touches and declare it good enough when it helped him. The freedom changed how he approached design. And it produced something more interesting than another generic clock.
Early versions looked clean. Uniform. Consistent. Hietala loved them on screen. Then the physical Pebble Time 2 arrived. He loaded the face. It felt boring on his wrist. The spark was gone.
That’s when he saw Comic Drop, a watchface that uses comic-book panel layouts. The idea stuck. What if events appeared in dynamic panels that shifted throughout the day? Pixel art showing a computer in the morning or a barbell for exercise sounded appealing. Skill level stopped him there. He abandoned the art but kept the comic-book energy.
Thicker lines appeared. Brighter colors. Deliberate irregularities. The new style caught his eye on the wrist. It felt alive. Not perfect, but engaging enough to pull his attention when static widgets on his phone had long since faded into the background.
His brain filters static information with ruthless efficiency. Calendar apps, habit trackers and todo lists on his phone occupied most of the screen yet became invisible within days. He needed motion. Change. Something that refused to be ignored.
So events on the watchface use randomized geometry. Wedges and arcs shift shape slightly each time. The variation keeps the display fresh. Uniform layouts look tidier in screenshots. They suit a round watch better in theory. But the irregular versions fight his tendency to tune out. They win on that score.
Events don’t sit fixed on the clock face either. They drift toward 12 o’clock as time passes. An appointment three hours away starts near the 3. As it approaches, it moves. When it becomes current, it sits at the top. A colored band around the clock face counts down remaining time, echoing physical Time Timer devices. Once the event ends, it disappears. The design trades easy history for a constant sense of urgency.
Hietala tested many variations. Single events. Four in quick succession. Days packed wall to wall. He removed text labels for events. The question that matters most to him isn’t what the meeting is about. It’s whether anything sits on the schedule at all. Removing labels reduced clutter and kept the focus on the shapes and motion.
The work timer builds on the same countdown idea. Warm-up periods, focused work blocks and breaks appear as growing and shrinking segments. One counts up while the other counts down. The visual language stays consistent. Yet implementation brought unexpected headaches.
Pebble watchfaces run as background processes. They cannot claim the physical buttons. Taps and steps work, but direct button control does not. Hietala tried tap-only controls for starting and stopping timers. Too unreliable. Building it as a full app meant constant relaunching. Friction he refused to accept.
The chosen workaround routes commands through the companion phone app and back to the watchface. It’s awkward. He already needs the companion for calendar sync, so the extra layer stings less. Still, he calls it janky. The compromise shows how far he was willing to go to keep the experience smooth for himself.
Alarms presented an even thornier problem. Traditional timers failed him completely. He simply ignored them and kept working. Pomodoro sessions of 25 minutes meant nothing when he regularly lost track for two minutes or two hundred. So he designed alarms that refuse to be dismissed easily.
When break time arrives, the watch vibrates, plays a tune and transforms the screen into a comic-style blast. First, the user must walk at least 20 steps. Only then can repeated taps clear the alert. The screen keeps updating and the alarm repeats every 30 seconds until handled. Steps appear along the border during the alarm. No calendar events show while it’s active. The design forces movement. It mostly works. Sometimes he waves his arm enough to register steps without leaving his chair. Raising the step requirement makes legitimate breaks annoying. Tuning continues.
He created distinct visual styles and vibration patterns for different alerts. A short pause between work blocks. The end of all scheduled work. The close of the entire day. A simple manual alarm. Each feels different at a glance and on the wrist.
Date and week number appear simply. A basic 31/10 label plus a small floating week indicator. Earlier prototypes tried more creative layouts but crowded the screen. He settled for minimal. Steps proved surprisingly hard to get right. Multiple attempts at edge trackers, health bars and columns all felt wrong. The final choice lives in the current design but receives less explanation than the calendar and timer elements.
Prototyping moved fast thanks to Claude. Hietala used the AI to generate dozens of visual variations, interactive HTML simulations and even a chiptune sound library. Some outputs lacked taste. Many required heavy guidance. Yet the speed let him test ideas before writing any real code. The embedded simulator in his post demonstrates the full watchface in action. Users can start tasks, watch events move and see the alarm flow.
The entire project reflects a broader revival of interest in Pebble devices. The company, revived under original founder Eric Migicovsky, showed the Pebble Round 2 at CES 2026 with a thin circular e-paper display and two-week battery. IEEE Spectrum reported on the launch, noting the deliberate choice to skip heart-rate monitors in favor of simplicity and thinness. The Pebble Time 2 offers a larger rectangular screen with heart-rate sensing and a speaker.
RePebble, the community that kept the original platform alive, now supports new hardware. A spring 2026 app contest encouraged developers to create fresh watchfaces and apps for the new models. The RePebble blog announced prizes including limited transparent Time 2 units. SDK updates accompanied the contest, making development smoother.
Other recent watchfaces show continued creativity. One developer released Almost Five, an open-source face based on older text-watch projects with improved calendar reminders and no-Bluetooth indicators. The Medium post by Harlan Harris details the AI-assisted process and invites testers. Another face called Skyarc displays full-day weather, temperature trends and rain forecasts to help users plan their day. Community discussions on Reddit and elsewhere show users hunting for the best new options in 2026.
Hietala’s project stands apart because it refuses to be general-purpose. It solves one person’s specific pain points with unusual solutions. Non-uniform event shapes. Drifting timeline. Forced-movement alarms. A comic aesthetic that refuses to sit still. These choices might not appeal to everyone. They don’t have to.
But the approach offers a lesson. Personal technology can be exactly that: personal. When the goal is removing friction rather than chasing downloads, designers gain freedom to make odd, specific, sometimes messy decisions. The watchface that results may never ship. It may look strange in screenshots. On the wrist of the one person who needs it, though, it might just work.
Hietala continues tweaking. The step threshold for alarms needs refinement. Some visual elements still don’t feel final. The companion app round-trip still bothers him. Yet the core experience already helps more than previous attempts. Events no longer vanish from awareness. Breaks happen more often. The day feels a little less like quicksand.
And in a world of mass-produced wearables that track everything for everyone, a single custom face built for one brain stands out. It reminds us that sometimes the most powerful feature is the one that fits only you.
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