Design Stories 04 / 06
The textured Space Man dial and its International Orange register

The Dials.

Three worlds. One sky to read them all by.

Scroll
SW0284 · Story 06
Space Man · Race Man · New Man

A Saturn dial is never just a color. Each one is a world we fell for, and each carries a name built around the same word: Man.

00 The Idea

Pick an obsession, follow it honestly, and let every choice on the dial trace back to it.

The texture, the finish, the accent colors. Nothing is decoration. Everything is a reference.

Space Man, the black space dial
Space Man · Black
The black dial
Textured like deep space, with a subdial in the true colors of spaceflight.
Race Man, the brushed blue dial
Race Man · Blue
The brushed blue dial
Born from the overlooked beauty of yacht racing.
New Man, the lacquered dial
New Man · Lacquer
The lacquered dial
With the soul of vintage motorsport.
Three dials. Three worlds. One sky to read them all by.
I · Space Man · Black

This was the first. Before any other dial, there was the space dial.

Because the brand is named for a planet, and the sky is where all of it begins.

The black had to be textured. Not flat black, but the black of space itself: the scatter of stars, the grain of meteorite dust, the endless points of light that appear the moment you really look up.

A comet trailing orange and blue tails against the stars An astronaut suit in International Orange and rescue blue A gloved hand with an orange accent band
International Orange, and rescue blue. The real palette of spaceflight. Fig. 01 · Space & exploration

The 24-hour subdial wears blue and orange, and that pairing isn’t decoration. It’s the real palette of spaceflight.

The orange is International Orange, the exact high-visibility shade chosen for launch-and-entry suits, so a crew could be spotted from the air or the open sea. It’s the same orange that paints the Golden Gate Bridge: a quiet California coincidence we didn’t plan, but happily kept.

The blue echoes the rescue straps on the suit itself. Together they also do something perfect on a 24-hour register: orange for day, blue for night.

International OrangeLaunch & entry · day
Rescue BlueSuit straps · night
Deep Space BlackTextured · meteorite grain
Macro of the textured black dial and the International Orange 24-hour subdial
Fig. 02 · The black of space, and the orange of the suit. Texture you can read. SW0284 Space Man
Space Man · Black

The first dial, and the sky the rest were born under.

II · Race Man · Blue

The blue dial is water. The deep, open blue of the racing sea.

I wanted to texture it like waves, but doing that well would have pushed the price somewhere I wasn’t willing to go, and I won’t fake it with a cheap stamped texture. Either a thing is done right or it isn’t.

So the blue gets a clean brushed finish instead: honest, and beautiful on its own terms.

A twelve-metre racing yacht with a teal hull and orange start signal Two classic yachts racing on open water A spinnaker marked with an orange disc against the sky
Open-water racing in the era of legends. Fig. 03 · Yacht racing

It comes from yacht racing: one of the most gorgeous sports almost nobody talks about.

The orange accent is the starting signal, the flag that marks the line and sends the fleet away. The green and teal are the colors I chose for the heritage of the sport: open-water racing in the era of legends, The teal is the color most yachts use to paint the deck and the green is the color of tools they use on the Yachts.

I called it Race Man because the story doesn’t stop at the water. That same spirit, and those same colors, run deep with racing drivers too.

Signal OrangeThe starting flag
Heritage GreenEra of legends
Racing TealOpen-water hull
Macro of the brushed blue dial with the green, teal and orange subdial
Fig. 04 · A clean brushed blue, and the signal colors of the start. SW0284 Race Man
Race Man · Blue

Made for the people who live for the start.

III · New Man · Lacquer

This one lives in vintage motorsport.

The dial is finished in lacquer, the closest a watch dial can come to real automotive paint, and it carries a single red accent line: the kind that ran down the flanks of the classic racing cars I keep coming back to, the Porsche 356 chief among them.

A classic Porsche 356 with a single red racing stripe A vintage racing car dashboard and gauges A vintage tachometer glowing red
A single red line, down the flank of a classic. Fig. 05 · Vintage motorsport

The name reads two ways: a new take, and a new man.

There’s a wink in there too, for the people who’ll catch it. But I’ll let you find that one yourself.

Racing RedThe accent line
Lacquer BaseAutomotive finish · color to be confirmed
Macro of the lacquered dial with concentric subdials and a red accent
Fig. 06 · Lacquer, the closest a dial comes to automotive paint, with one red line. SW0284 New Man · base color TBC
New Man · Lacquer

Old paint. New Man.

Three dials. Three worlds. One sky to read them all by.

Time, Structured.