Halftone clock

A clock face made of Risograph dots, where the dot size is the minute and the angle of the screen is the hour. It is unreadable for about the first hour and then, suddenly, it isn't.

It started as a test of a dot-screen routine we wanted for a poster series. Rather than test it on a still image, which tells you very little, we drove it with a value that changes once a second. Bugs in a screen algorithm are invisible in a photograph and obvious in motion.

That is exactly what happens with a well-set numeral system, and it was nice to watch it happen in an afternoon.

The pleasant surprise was the reading behaviour. People do not count dots; they learn the texture. After a couple of minutes you stop decoding and start recognising the whole field the way you recognise the shape of a word. That is exactly what happens with a well-set numeral system, and it was nice to watch it happen in an afternoon.

The screen routine ended up in two client projects. The clock is still on a monitor in the corner of the studio and nobody has taken it down.