Custom Clock Face Design

I recently had the honor to help a friend and colleague create a very special gift for her father. After celebrating his 60th birthday this past August, her sister and she came up with an idea for a belated gift to surprise him with, just in time for Thanksgiving. They purchased a handsome circular wall clock with a wooden frame and asked if I would help redesign the clock face. She had seen pieces I had done before, like this image of my husband and I sitting on his old truck blended with an image of the beach from our St. John honeymoon.

She really liked this effect of blending the images together and wanted to achieve a similar effect with old family photos. I scanned in all the photos and began to work on montaging the pieces together like a puzzle. I started out using the original clock face design as a template, just to get an idea where the numbers and clock hands would fall.

The clock numbers on the original face were very large and the composition was starting to get a little busy. I knew I would have to redesign the entire face to incorporate smaller numbers so that the images wouldn't be obscured but the piece still functioned as a readable clock.

With smaller numbers and a simpler font, the clock face was already looking cleaner, but I was still concerned that the images weren't blending together as well as I would like. Many of the older shots had the subject of the picture too close to the edge of the image, not leaving very much material to blend into the next image. Always wanting to give my clients more than one option to choose from, I decided to try another idea:


In this layout, I flooded the majority of the clock face with a sepia toned image of the clients' parents sitting besides a lake along with another image of their father and uncle at the top of the canvas. Sprinkled along the right side of the face, I grouped the other scanned images in circular frames. This helped solve the problem of some of the subjects being too close to the edge of the picture. It also created a very clean design and a clock face that would be very easy to read.

Even though I was glad to provide another option, I knew that she really liked the blended effect much more and re-worked that version completely from scratch before presenting both options to her. One at a time, I nestled each image between a set of neighboring numbers and blended them together as I went around the circle. This helped clean up the design significantly and left white space for the copy in the center, which read:

William Fasano
The Life & Times
Established 1949

During the process, I shared a quick preview of Version 2, with the picture circles, to my client. She confirmed my prediction that she preferred the blended look more. However, she really liked the way I used the large image of her parents in Version 2 and requested that I find some way to incorporate that into the preferred option. This piece was sent for her and her sister to approve:

They loved it! With final approval I sent it out to Mpix for a 12" x 12" print on Kodak E-Surface Professional Photo Paper with a Matte finish. When the print arrived, I dismantled the original clock face and removed the hands. I pasted the new design over the old one and reassembled the clock, just in time for the holiday delivery. My friend was very happy with the finished product and I was thrilled to be a part of such a thoughtful gift.

Blended image montages make beautiful and unique gifts. If you would like to learn more, please post or email me at kathy@katandmousedesign.com.