One year ago today we launched our first watch on Kickstarter, and one year ago today it was fully funded and we had a business. It's been an exciting first year, with shipments of the H1 complete and our follow up, the Swiss powered Neon Automatic, announced and now in the prototyping stage.
I didn't want to let this milestone go past un-noticed, so I went through a load of folders and found some in-progress images from the H1 development process. Some of them are miles away from what we ended up with, and some of them are really rough quick ideas, but I thought it might be of interest to some.
First drawing
This is the very first image of the H1 I ever created. At this point it was just a drawing I did in one of the MacAffinity products. It was un-named and un-branded, but gave me something to work from. The yellow never happened, and the bezel grip later changed to far bigger teeth.
Working out 3D imaging
From the first drawings it was time to play around with 3D modelling. As you can see, it took a while to get that worked out! Here is an early rendering attempt.
First reasonable renders
Finally we got some decent renders done. Not astonishing, but enough that I had an idea that I was on the right track. Still no branding as you can see, and the chapter ring didn't exist yet. The date window was in the wrong place, and we didn't have a sandwich dial at this point. It was getting closer to the final design now though.
Playing with branding
Before finally selling on Hamtun we went through a few other names, including naming it after myself (my ego would have enjoyed that, but my name is too boring) and Vectis, which is an old name for the island I was born on.
This was the final round of changes before we went to the factory to move on to the next stage. With the exception of the logo and the bezel grip, the final "Vectis" branded image is the watch head design we used for our first prototype. The only significant design change between this and the production run is that the seconds hand was changed to be blue for the full length.
Hope that's interesting!
