Behind the scenes: designing Dalli dalli!

The colourful Dalli Dalli! watch was designed by German illustrator Cynthia Kittler and is limited to just 100 pieces worldwide. Here's a look into the process, from the initial designs, all the way through to the finished version. 

Images from Cynthia's Instagram page.

We really enjoy Cynthia’s style, so we were excited to collaborate with her for this new watch design.

Cynthia proposed a few great ideas, but our absolute favourite was the nostalgic ‘running man’. This was a fun way to read the time, based on her own experience of constantly running late…

“I had to run to the bus for school, to the trains, trams, to sports, to classes in order to be punctual. Not only one time I tripped, fell down, scraped my knee, and slipped on ice. I still do, and I have a hard time getting out of the house in a timely manner. If I seem to be on time for once, I don’t find my keys, sunglasses, earplugs and have to check if the door is locked several times… The running thing has become a joke the family still makes about me.”

Straight away we knew Cynthia’s design idea would work well on a watch face. Her crazy little character was using legs to display the time (which we thought was an inventive twist on the traditional idea of using watch hands to read the time).

Here’s Cynthia working up the design in her studio.

Cynthia drew the design by hand which created an interesting texture on the finished watch. The sketch looks great, doesn't it?!

Cynthia’s style is always very colourful - so we were excited to see the colours Cynthia chose for this design. 

Here are the first digital mock-ups of the design.

We then moved onto creating the first watch samples to test the design. Once we were happy with the colours, we started working on the print.

Although at a glance the design looks quite minimal - the watch was printed on the glass, minute, hour disc and dial and is has cumulatively the most print impressions of any watch we've ever created - with a total of 29 individual print layers across 13 different colours on each watch.

Here's a behind the scenes look into the printing process. Our print technician Paul Wardski printed each watch individually in our London workshop.

Here's are some images and videos of the watch being assembled by our small team (Cat and Elena) right here in London.

Here's the finished design, you can find out more about it here.

We are really pleased with the final result. Let us know what you think of the design by leaving a comment in the box below.