Watch Face Designer Interview: TACTWO TACTICAL

Łukasz Wieczorek
Facer
Published in
5 min readNov 30, 2017

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At Facer, one of the things that excites us the most is seeing the incredible creativity of the designers using our platform to define what watchmaking means in the digital age, and in a broader sense push “fashion tech” forward. To help shed some light on the creative minds behind this revolution, we are starting a new articles series which will feature interviews with some of the most popular designers on Facer: “The Designer Interview Series”.

To kickstart it, who better than TACTWO TACTICAL, the brain child of German designer Norman Oertel, whose faces are some of the most synced on Facer today. With inspiration from the past featuring analog elements mixed with sleek futuristic design language, TACTWO TACTICAL has a style of his own. Let’s jump in and learn a little about him.

Hi Norman! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Norman Oertel, aka Tactwo Tactical, wearing his prize for the 1k follower contest: the HUAWEI Watch 2

Hello, my name is Norman, I’m 39 years old and I’m from Germany (Saxony-Anhalt). On Facer, I publish my designs under the nick TacTwo Tactical. Professionally, I have been working as an insurance broker for about 15 years. I really like this job, although sometimes I would rather work more creatively. In my free time, I like to be out in nature and do a lot of sports, where I mostly rock the nearby Downhill Track with my bike, go for a run in the woods or train at the shooting range on my precision and speed. I am interested in anything about military and police — especially for operation, tactical equipment and weapon technology. And last but not least — I’m tech savvy and love to design watch faces…

How did you get started with watch face design?

When I got a Samsung Gear S3 in January 2017, I also quickly started to design my own watch faces. The pre-installed watch faces were boring. In search of a suitable watch face, I landed at Facer comparatively quickly. I wanted a personalized watch face that could meet my needs and still look good — but could not find one. So I thought , why not do one yourself, I looked around on different platforms for testing. However, Facer was the best choice because of its versatility and ease of use.

What is your watch face design process like? do you sketch first, start in photoshop, illustrator?

Actually, I do not have a specific approach when I do a watch face. Either I have an idea for a specific design or like to be inspired by things in my environment. Since I’ve always been interested in watches, I often “stumble” on designs of real watches, which I then try to implement in a watch face. Sometimes I try to come close to the original, sometimes not. I always attach great importance to a good usability in an appealing design. Graphic programs I use only when the possibilities in the Facer Creator are exhausted. Many things can already be done with Facer Creator by using shapes, bringing them together with matching transparency on a nice background. The ability to use almost any .ttf font is another great advantage of Facer. After the “skeleton” in Facer Creator is done, I copy the design into my graphics program and implement all other elements and create the necessary graphics. Once created, many objects can be used repeatedly (clock hands, etc.) This is also true for the tags and expressions in Facer.

Which watch face are you the proudest of? Why?

Well, that’s hard to say — I look at my work at Facer rather holistically. I think the whole X-Tactical series is my favorite. But if I had to commit to one, it would probably be the DUAL INFO or the TACTICAL DTG watch face. On this, I think I managed to put a lot of information in a small space, without compromising the design. Furthermore these include a working Date Time Group (DTG) with the related military time zone names. It took many hours and gave me some headaches to create these codes by trial and error because the only available reference points in the Facer Creator are UTC and local time, but finally I brought this together…

Are there other watch face designers you love on Facer?

There is an incredibly huge number of good designers within the Facer community. I especially like the work of tr0n09, because he has so many unique ideas and he implements them in a real good way. GRR Watch faces and INMOTION are also among my favorites — their graphical work is almost perfect.

Furthermore, I find these watch faces are very well done:

Where do you see watch faces in the next few years?

On smartwatches, ha ha!… Joking aside, I did not really think about that. Watch faces are still very young and the development of smartwatches and their capabilities is progressing fast. Perhaps one day, the watch face will interact with the user in a way that it will automatically adjust in design, function and information depending on the users preferences, what the user is doing or where he is currently being.

Any tips for aspiring watch face designers?

Start small, maybe with a digital time only watch face and persist, even if something does not work the right away at the beginning . Familiarize yourself with the technique and functionality of the Facer Creator when you get started. Use the possibilities of the large Community in the forum. Take a look around at Facer on what others have done to get some inspiration or ideas.

Anything else you’d like to add?

I want to thank all users of my watch faces. Thanks for so much positive feedback — I will continue to do my best … Thanks to the Facer team and the forum for their support.

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☞ Interested in joining Facer and start creating your own watch faces? Go to www.facer.io

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Designer and FUI specialist. I’ve helped tell stories via UI for: Apple, Google, Corvette, Buick, Mazda, Denali, The Walking Dead, The Martian.