Custom watch faces leverage a dynamic, digital canvas that can include colors, animations, and
contextual information.

Creating a watch face for Wear OS involves visualizing time clearly,
just as you would for a traditional watch face. Wear devices
provide advanced capabilities for watch faces that you can leverage in your designs, such as
vibrant colors, dynamic backgrounds, animations, and data integration. However, there are
also many design considerations to take into account.

To design a watch face without coding, see
[Watch Face Studio](https://developer.samsung.com/watch-face-studio/user-guide).

To begin designing a watch face, review other examples of watch faces. Download the
[Wear OS companion app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.wearable.app) to browse a large selection of watch faces.

## Plan the implementation of the watch face

After you finalize the design for your watch face, you need to determine how to obtain any
necessary data and draw the watch face on the wearable device. Most implementations
consist of the following components:

- One or more background images.
- Application code that retrieves the required data.
- Application code that draws text and shapes over the background images.

Apps typically show different background images for the interactive and
ambient modes. It can be difficult to create a good-looking image for ambient mode.
Therefore, ambient mode backgrounds are often completely black or grey with no image.

Background images for Wear devices with a screen density of hdpi should be 320 by 320 pixels in
size. The corners of the background image aren't visible on round devices. In your code, you can
detect the size of the device screen and scale down the background image if the device has a lower
resolution than your image. To improve performance, scale the background image only once and store
the resulting bitmap.

Run the application code to retrieve contextual data only as often as required
and store the results to reuse the data every time you draw the watch face. For example, you
don't need to fetch weather updates every minute.

Keep the application code that draws your watch face in ambient mode relatively simple to
increase battery life. You usually draw outlines of shapes using a limited set of colors
in this mode. In interactive mode, you can use full color, complex shapes, gradients, and
animations to draw your watch face.

The remaining lessons in this class show you how to implement watch faces in detail.

## Related resources


Refer to the following related resources:

- [WatchFace sample](https://github.com/android/wear-os-samples)