Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/01/08/omega-specialties-ck-859-a-sector-as-sweet-as-nectar-reprise/
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What’s there and what’s not
It is this variation in length that helps divide the dial into quarters visually, even though it is missing another hallmark of some sector dial watches, a full dial crosshair. Some would say that you cannot have a sector dial watch without such a crosshair, but since it was never a universal detail, I would argue that the visually implied crosshair works just fine.
That is what comes across with this dial, the thick quarter hour lines visually divide the face of the watch to give a clear, instrument like feel.
This is only possible thanks to careful application of line weight, spacing, and negative space. The absence of a feature can sometimes play just as important a role as a feature that is present, at least when it comes to how you perceive a design.
The double minute tracks giving way into a very spread out hour track with three long, thick markers allow the eye to move from a busy and detailed measurement to a mostly empty interior, allowing the eye to take the strongest visual elements and extrapolate from that. The longer thick lines aren’t required to connect for your brain to accept that they do.
Inside the hour track sit three larger Arabic numerals marking three, nine, and twelve o’clock, once again only pausing at six o’clock to present the off-center seconds dial. This dial is recessed with a very subtle double step down to the twelve sector ring, echoing the design but keeping the line weight small so as to avoid drawing too much attention to this dial and breaking the visual impact of the broader dial.
What makes a larger impact, once again, is the lack of any strong color to the dial. Made in a perfectly satin silver, the dial is unobtrusive and allows for amazing contrast with the blue pad-printed markings around the dial. This is continued with the expertly blued hands, only slightly divergent in hue from the printing thanks to the fact that it is pristinely polished metal instead of a flat ink.
Outside of the vintage Omega logo and typeface just under the twelve o’clock numeral (and the obligatory Swiss Made on the bottom), the dial keeps it supremely simple to highlight the precisely deliberate design aesthetic.
Little touches
One detail that stays hidden until you look extra closely is the final wording on the dial, “Ag925” sitting just above the central shaft for the hour and minute hands. The words are engraved into the satin silver dial and have no special finish, just a satin surface that matches the dial and allows it to fall into the background. This is almost akin to the secret signature seen on a Breguet timepiece, but in this context, it is a touch of class to indicate silver alloy the dial is made from.
A solid silver dial is nothing new in watchmaking, nor is one finished with a perfect satin texture. But a sector dial watch, something alluding to precision and chronometry, is not the first thing you think of when you think of solid silver dials. For a watch like this, it could have easily been a typical brass base with rhodium plating and the aesthetics would have been largely the same, but it shows a way to elevate a explicitly utilitarian design to new heights.
Such a practical aesthetic born of the Art-Deco movement is often considered a low-key design because it usually does not include flashy or flourishing details, and geometrically simple dials are not what people usually write home about. Unless you are a designer and then you sit and stare at the judiciously applied line weights, spacing between sectors, typography used for the numerals, and the expertly considered negative space.
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Credits: Article and images by Joshua Munchow @ Quill & Pad. See the original article here - https://quillandpad.com/2024/01/08/omega-specialties-ck-859-a-sector-as-sweet-as-nectar-reprise/