A workshop with a house style.
WISPWARE is the watch-face side of Falling Stars, a one-person workshop that makes software and writes stories. The two halves share a look, a method, and a deep-seated belief that stories take on a life of their own beyond the medium, whether that is a book or just a watch face.
ASCII, phosphor, and the glow of an old screen.
The house style did not start here. It was built for earlier projects and carried forward on purpose: near-black grounds, monospaced type, a phosphor accent, scanlines, a blinking block cursor, glyphs drawn out of characters. A terminal you would actually want to look at.
It is neo-retro rather than nostalgic. The point is not to imitate a machine from 1983, it is that those machines had a confidence about their own materials. Light on black. Nothing decorative that is not also doing a job.
Function first
The numbers come first and they are chosen deliberately. If a metric is on the face, someone who wears that face actually looks at it.
Delight is earned, not bolted on
The companion appears at the wrist-raise, which is the one moment you were already looking. It never interrupts and it never asks for anything.
Drawn in code, not pixels
Every glow, gauge and expression is procedural. Sharp at any size, memory-light, and true to the phosphor idiom rather than a picture of it.
It started as something to hand on.
Part of what I make is meant for my children. Not as a product, but as an experience to pass down: the taste for old screens and monospaced type re-imagined in modern media. It's the habit of building something because it is good rather than because it works, so that it becomes a story worth reading later.
When that turned into watch faces, the same instinct followed it. We did not just want a functional face. We wanted an engaging one, something with a bit of character on it, that you would be glad to see when you turned your wrist over. That became Wisp: a small phosphor orb that watches your day and has opinions about it.
There is some Tamagotchi in the idea and we are happy to admit it. The difference is that Wisp runs on real data from your own body and your own weather. There is nothing to feed and nothing to neglect. It cannot die of inattention. It simply lives there beside you, telling you what it makes of the day, nudging you when that seems useful, and quietly pleased to be of help.
Wisp also answers when you reach out. Raise your wrist, then press and hold on Wisp. We tucked in a little Easter egg for you to discover.
A version for each kind of wearer.
Garmin owners are not a single monotonous bunch. There is a spectrum: the person tracking sleep and stress, the serious runner chasing a race, the one who runs because it is beautiful outside. They want different things from the same square inch.
So instead of one face with forty settings, the plan is a face built for one group at a time, as close to what that group actually wants as we can get, with the same companion and the same cast living across all of them. That is the whole idea of WISPWARE: one character, many homes.