Digital Watch Display

    

     This case for a Timex digital watch was designed to be functional and reusable as a display featuring the watch and the brand attached to it.  Its small, hand-held size makes it practical for store shelves and at home, since it takes up little inventory space and can be kept for the owner to store the watch when not using it.  At the same time, plastic, paper, and ink are cheap materials that can be disposed of if the purchaser wishes to, unlike other brands or manufactures who may use expensive components like leather, felt, or metals.

     The kind of shopper that this display is going for wants  to be economical, since they don't want to spend too much on another watch brand made with more costly materials.  This kind of audience wants to make the most of their purchase, in that they'd buy into the case's design and reuse it for storage of their watch in the future.

     The packaging is crude in its design, down to the aesthetic choice of the case's exterior decoration.  The stone-textured gray tones contrast with the sharp, yellow borders to present an earthly tone that has been imposed upon by human artifice, like graffiti on a highway wall.  This is another detail that specifies the kind of audience the brand wants to attract to the watch: those who are also drawn to that clashing of the earthly and the artifical. 

     The idea behind the design was to communicate a particular style that served in the advertisement of this watch.  The design problem was to minimize costs while designing the case in such a way that allows it to be easily placed in store shelves and reused by the customer at home.
   
     Whether the aesthetics of the display work for any given viewer depends on whether the style fits their tastes personally, but it is clear that the exterior was given more thought and effort than the interior.  While the exterior maintains that crude, earthly tone, the inside is plastic and whitewashed, seemingly unfinished.   While the case was intended to be viewed exclusively from the outside, every time the owner wishes to put in or take out their watch from the case they always see the inside.  It's arguably more noticeable as a result, since the owner likely won't look at the case itself unless they need to use it.
   
     A potential solution could be to alter the materials used - specifically, the type of paper pasted to the exterior.  Since the plastic case itself is transparent, using transparent paper would allow the design of the exterior to show through both ways.  Once they paste the paper onto the plastic surface, that design will carry through as well, decorating the interior.  This would be less expensive than completely restructuring the display's design in order to fit inked paper into the interior as well as the exterior.