With the original Apple Watch celebrating its 5 year birthday yesterday (24th of April), Imran Chaudhri, a designer who was at the forefront of the Apple Watch design team, shared his initial design ideas and their evolution in a series of tweets today. With over 20 years of experience imagining and bringing his imaginations to life, Imran is a lead designer at Apple. These initial designs show the foundation of some of the most defining features of Apple Watches.
According to reports published in 2019, Apple sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry combined. So, it’s pretty safe to say that iWatches have become a major player for this California-based multinational company.
This tweet shows the initial draft for the iconic ‘Honeycomb’ design used in-app selection. Here, the tweet clearly shows how the E.T. touch display idea stood out to Chaudhri. This Electronic Touch showed the potential for a new form of human-gadget connection. The E.T.(meaning Extraterrestrial in this context) art looks super cool as well!
The initial prototype was made using a 6th Gen iPod Nano. strapped to a watch band
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According to the designer himself, the idea of an uncomplicated minimalist wrist strap always appealed to him. The mechanism for the loop watchband was an evolution of Velcro straps used by astronauts in the Apollo mission.
In this tweet, Chaudhri explains his idea of the butterfly-themed Watch-face. This animated butterfly shows the Sun’s position at any given time. Then, with the help of Zuckerman Studios, the signature Motion watch face was born. Also, no blue critters were hurt in the making of the iWatch!
By the end of 2019, 30.7 million Apple watches were sold worldwide. This was a 36% increase in sales from the previous year of 2018 where 23 million units were sold. That being said, with digital watches triumphing in both ease of use and functionality over traditional analog ones, it’s safe to say that this number will only go higher.
