Alright, so today I tried to replicate a watch face, the OMEGA X-33 Marstimer. Sounds fancy, right? Well, it kinda is. But the real challenge was dealing with some weird text stuff on my computer.
First, I opened up my usual software where I do all my design work. I started by finding a good picture of the actual OMEGA X-33 Marstimer watch face online. I dragged and dropped it into the software. This would be my reference.
Next, I started to recreate the elements. This watch has a lot of digital displays and text. So, I began with drawing basic shapes – circles for the watch face, rectangles for those digital number displays, you know, the usual stuff.
Now, the tricky part started when I got into those special characters, especially the ‘+’ sign. Every time I wanted to put a plus sign, it turned into some gibberish. I was like, “What the heck is going on?” I typed a plus, and it showed up fine in the text box, but once I moved on, it changed. I tried a few times, thinking I was doing something wrong, but nope, same problem.
So, I did what any normal person would do – I started to messing around on internet. I typed in something like “plus sign turns into weird text” into the search bar. And guess what? Turns out, it’s a common issue. Something about URL decoding, where a ‘%2B’ is supposed to be a plus but gets messed up. Some folks were saying it’s because the system is trying to read it as a part of a web address, even though I wasn’t doing anything web-related.
I found a few forums where people were talking about this exact problem. One person suggested copying the plus sign from a different program and pasting it. I thought, “Why not?” So I opened up a word document, typed a plus sign there, copied it, and then pasted it into my design software. And… it worked! I was pretty stoked, not gonna lie.
After I figured that out, I got down to the nitty-gritty: adding text, adjusting fonts, and getting the colors right. I won’t bore you with the details, but there was a lot of back and forth to make sure my design matched the real thing. I kept zooming in and out of the reference picture, comparing it to my work, tweaking things here and there.
Here are some key things I did:
- Copied a plus sign from a word document and pasted it into my design.
- Drew shapes to match the watch face layout.
- Added text and adjusted it to look like the original.
- Matched colors by picking them from the reference picture.
- Adjusted sizes and positions of elements until it looked just right.
Finally, after a few hours of work, I had a pretty decent replica of the OMEGA X-33 Marstimer watch face. It wasn’t perfect, but I was happy with it. Especially after that whole plus sign adventure.
So, yeah, that’s my story of how I spent my day wrestling with a design software and a plus sign. It’s funny how the smallest things can sometimes be the biggest pain. But hey, I learned something new, and that’s always a win in my book.
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