How to make custom Moto 360 watch faces with Facer
The Moto 360 comes with some attractive watch faces, and most of them can even be customized to your liking. Still, you might want something a little more personal. The official watch face API is not available yet, but that hasn’t stopped resourceful Android developers from creating custom watch faces. You can create your own custom watch face with an app called Facer.
With Facer you can create virtually any watch face you can imagine, if you’re willing to put in a little work. Your watch face can be as simple or complex as you want. Facer allows you to make digital or analog watch faces with elements such as weather, battery, date, etc. The first step is to download Facer from the Play Store. It costs $0.99, but if you love customizing things it will be the best dollar you ever spent.
How does Facer work?
Before we dive into making a watch face let’s talk about some basic functions. Facer uses layers to build a watch face. For example, one layer is the background, another layer could be text to display the time. Depending how complex your watch face is you could have anywhere from 2-20 different layers. Once you understand how to make a simple watch face, like we’ll show in this guide, you can easily go more complex.
To display the time, weather, date, or battery info, Facer uses tags. If you want your watch to read “02:30 PM Oct 07” it’s just a matter of choosing tags from a list. Tags can also determine how a hand rotates around the watch, if you’re interesting in making an analog design. Layers and tags are the two basic principles for using Facer. Be sure to watch the video above for a quick tutorial, and check out the slide shows (from r/facer) below to go more in-depth.
Digital Watch Face
The easiest watch face you can make with Facer is digital. You really only need a background image and some text. Follow the slide show below for a step-by-step guide.
Analog Watch Face
Creating an analog watch face is a little more tricky, but still easily doable. You’ll need to create images for the background and hour, minute, and second hands. Follow the slide show for the steps.
The Easy Way
The cool thing about Facer is you can install watch faces made by other people. Facerepo.com has tons of designs for the Moto 360 and other Android Wear devices. Browse the site on whichever device is connected to you watch, download the watch face you want, and then simply tap the “Import” icon. From here you can even edit the imported watch faces, which is a nice trick if you don’t want to design a watch from scratch.
Send Design to Watch
The last thing you need to do is send your design to your Moto 360 or other Android Wear device. It’s as easy as 1-2-3.
- Long-press your current watch face and select Facer from the list
- On your phone, tap the watch face you want to use
- Tap the “Send to Wear device” button
You can store many different designs in the Facer app, but only one at a time can be display on the watch. Once you get the hand of creating simple watch faces like the ones in this guide you can start exploring more options. The only limit is your imagination. If you have made a Facer watch face we’d love to see it! Share your creations and favorites in the comments below!
P.S. You can download the Phandroid watch face right here. Enjoy!