What time is it? Watches and horology

Longines are currently on a great roll of heritage reproductions - the first 20 or so of these are pretty much all really nice:

https://www.longines.com/watches/heritage-collection

Some are larger than the originals but mostly they're not silly sizes. The sector dial one in particular is a really nice watch IMO.

Would bang

Homage?

which makes the link text amusing (if you like dad jokes).

Being a typographer is a curse, to be honest. So much you can't un-see.

I think that Big Eye is a really nice watch, I like the case back as well. And the arabics really aren't bad, I'm massively nit-picking for the sake of the font nazi lols.

The new heritage chrono, though, that I couldn't live with - about half the fonts are really well done and then they've totally messed up the tachy scale by 1) using monospaced numerals so all the 1s have too much space around and 2) tracking the numbers too tight to compensate meaning some of them are colliding - you'd never, ever see either of those things on a vintage watch. Plus the "BASE 1000" text is in a font from the 1970s and digitally distorted (stretched) - just completely wrong.

Yeah I'm lolling at the "fake" in the file names.

When that watch came out I was quite annoyed at the crosshair line going through the logo but it's identical to the way it is on the original that they were copying, so fair enough.

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I was excited about the tuxedo Chronograph until I read that . How did they mess it up? I thought it was a straight repro of an old watch

Font nazi status: confirmed

beat me to it...

https://www.longines.com/watches/heritag­e-collection

why did you show me that!!!

you'd never, ever see either of those things on a vintage watch.

Do you have a view on why that is?

Didn't realise there was an OG. Shows what I know. I thought of this :

Purely because it wasn’t a thing until digital typesetting technology made it a thing.

Fonts, as in digital font files, widely adopted the standard of monospaced numerals early on because it allows for columns of numbers to line up. By default most cheaper fonts, system fonts especially, still do that and the most visible artefact of it is too much space around the 1s compared to traditional typesetting or lettering practice.

Vintage watches - really anything up the 90s to be honest - actually rarely used fonts as we know them. The dials were always hand-lettered by an expert craftsman and reproduced photographically (by screen printing or transfer printing). The technology didn’t exist to arrange type in different sizes, at different angles, based off a font. All metal type fonts were conceived to print blocks of lines of text onto paper. Watch dials are a very different problem.

So it’s only nowadays that you get designers (who are much less highly trained, typographically speaking) attempting to lay out complex lettering using computer software and completely failing to have any sensitivity to the specific challenges of dial design.

One of the other things that’s obvious on that Longines chrono is the numbers getting lighter/thinner as they get smaller. That’s digital scaling of the letterforms. Someone rendering those numbers by hand would adapt the shape of the characters to the available space while maintaining more consistent visual weight (especially in the thickness of the lines).

The overlapping numerals simply wasn’t possible in typesetting before photo type in the 70s and really didn’t happen at all until the 90s when digital type made it possible and everyone went crazy experimenting with extreme letter spacing, scaling, rotation etc. And up to then it would have been considered extremely bad practice, bordering on heresy.

Sector dials are kind of a genre, the JLC is pretty nice! Wish it didn’t have a date.

Fuck. I love the depth of knowledge on the forum.

Thank you. That was seriously interesting and informative.

I'd take it, date and all. So nice.

Speaking of nazis, does it make you a nazi (or at least suspicious in the eyes of y'all horologists) if you wear a watch that resembles the ww2 german flieger watch? I mean, I only found out recently that my late dad's watch that I've been wearing a lot (a fortis flieger 24h) does. Just for the record, he hated germans more than anything.

Good question. I'd hope not TBH. What are the chances of you meeting someone who both knows what it is and thinks it's weird to wear it?

Yeah that's true I guess. I'm just not much of a connaisseur on watches and it felt a little weird when I found out that it resembles a nazi relic. But now it's just my dad's watch again in my eyes. Thanks for the reassurance.

I hope not!

In my experience, when I have explained the provenance of mine, nobody has considered it Nazi memorabilia.

But now you've got me worried!

Going to be honest here, being English, I've always thought the idea of wearing German WW2 pilots watches is weird and makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Not something I'd usually mention, but as the the topic has come up...

Thanks that's really interesting.

It would be the same as wearing any other countries WWII airforce watch.

There wasn't an actual SS wing of the Luftwaffe as far as I know.

Here’s the OG tuxedo Chronograph. I can’t really see the flaws on the new version so suppose I could live with them.

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That is lovely

I have a Laco B-Uhr and have felt uncomfortable in the past, Luftwaffe Navigators would have been Nazi Party

Nobody here or in Germany has ever comentated

The people of Gernika and Poland may have a different view of Luftwaffe activity .