Ever since coming to Taiwan I have been looking for a specific kind of wall clock. You would think that in Asia finding a wall clock with the Chinese characters for numbers would be everywhere. Sadly this was not the fact. I looked everyplace imaginable, from clock stores, to night markets, I even searched the internet, but no luck. So instead of giving up I decided to make my own, and that’s what I did.

The first thing I had to do was to find a good, cheap, and customizable wall clock. I found what I was looking for at Ikea of all places.

This clock fit all of my requirements and now the hard part was in the design.

To design my clock was no easy task. The first thing I had to do was disassemble the whole clock to get the correct measurements. After all of that was done, I fired up Illustrator and got down to work. I first had to create the perfect circle to fit the clock which was easy, but creating the hour and minute tabs was where I got in trouble. They had to be perfect all around and I won’t bore you with the details, but it took me a while to figure it. Once that was done I had to add the Chinese Characters and line them up perfectly. Here is the final design.

The character in the middle of the clock is my Chinese last name which is pronounced as “hey” which means the color black. I made a version that was black background and white tabs and numbers, but I think it looks better this way. Check out the final product.

As generous as I am, if anyone that lives in Taiwan and, I have met them requests it, I will make a personalized design for you and send you the picture to print. Just tell me the character or imagine you want in the middle and if you want to keep the Chinese numbers or something else. You can send your request here : Clock Request

I like doing this kind of hack and will be thinking of new ones to do in the future.

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