Cogwork is an antique brass instrument you wear. The dial is photographed metal rather than a flat colour: Roman numerals from XII round to XI, engraved filigree between them, and the plate running edge to edge with no bezel in the way.
The ring is an instrument, not a picture
A channel is cut into the brass near the rim, twenty notches around it, a black edge above and below. The charge is not painted on. The channel is a dark cover, and over the part your reading has filled the cover is simply not drawn - so the dial's own brass shows through, the same metal with the same patina, continuous with the plate either side. It sweeps from twelve o'clock, and it sweeps because the complication you assigned to it says so, following that provider's own minimum and maximum.
Five complications, and what each one takes
The ring is one complication. It accepts a ranged value or short text, and it may be left empty. Out of the box it is set to the watch battery, and that is only its default: assign your steps, a goal, a temperature or anything else with a range, and the channel measures that instead.
Hand it something with no range and it does not go blank. The cover stays shut and the value is engraved into the brass beneath the hands, which is the one place a face like this would otherwise show an empty gauge.
Four app-shortcut slots sit inside the ring, at twelve, three, six and nine o'clock. Each accepts a small image or a monochromatic icon and draws the app's own icon, so what you see and what you tap agree. Left unassigned, a shortcut slot draws nothing at all: no outline, no placeholder, no reserved gap.
All five are yours to reassign on the watch.
Sixteen ways to leave it
- 4 finishes: antique brass, gunmetal, copper, blackened steel
- the seconds hand on or off
- the ring on or off, and off leaves clean brass rather than an empty groove
Hands you can read
Brass hands on a brass dial disappear. Cogwork prints the hour and minute hands in the numerals' own ink and relights them rather than flattening them, so the bevels and the piercing survive and the hands stay dark on the metal. Blackened steel is the exception: on that dial dark vanishes into dark, so it ships polished steel hands instead.
Always-on
The numerals return as amber lume and both hands as flat silhouettes. The seconds hand and the ring go dark, so the always-on screen is the time and the hours, and nothing else.
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Antique brass dial. The ring is a complication you assign, not a painted gauge.