Nomos Metro ice blue: Mark Braun turns urban sky into a watch dial (interview)

Mark Braun's brief for the Nomos Metro date power reserve ice blue: an elegant dress watch that reflects the urban identity of the city you live in, adding a power reserve without wrecking the dial's harmony.

Dress the dial in the shifting blues of the urban sky — a 'piece of sky' on the wrist — with eleven sizes of circles proportioned by the Fibonacci code.

Blues shifting from cool light blue to near-white; at least 30-40 dial iterations on circle sizes and distances; a patented quick-set date on the hand-wound DUW 4701 with 52-hour reserve, its off-centre aperture deliberately shifting the logo.

Launched into a Metro line that has collected the iF Design Award, the Red Dot and the German Design Award; the first Metro was also the first watch to carry Nomos's own swing system; the ice blue drew praise across skin tones at the Nomos Forum gathering.

In a Worldtempus interview published 8 October 2026, Berlin product designer Mark Braun walks through his latest creation for NOMOS Glashütte, Germany's largest watchmaker: the 37mm Metro date power reserve ice blue. Braun says he wanted 'an elegant dress watch, which reflects the urban identity of the city where you live' — the dial runs through shades of blue, from cool light blue to almost white with the light, drawn from the skies over cities like Berlin or New York: 'to wear a piece of sky on your arm, not the worst thing.'

The dial is built on circles: counting the crown, at least eleven different sizes sit on the front, proportioned with what Braun calls the Fibonacci code — 'it gives a hint about distance and sizes' — and tuned across 30 to 40 iterations until the elements float with what he describes as the mobile tension of a Calder sculpture. The one deliberate disturbance is the power-reserve indicator, which breaks the dial's harmony — 'a beauty spot,' he calls it — and makes the watch 'a bit like a Tamagotchi you need to wind' as the meter turns turquoise while the mainspring unwinds.

The engineering is Nomos through and through: twelve years after Braun designed the first Metro — the first watch to carry the brand's own swing system escapement — the new model runs the hand-wound DUW 4701 with a patented quick-set date and 52 hours of power reserve, visible through a sapphire case back. The Metro family, now sixteen models, has collected the iF Design Award, the Red Dot and the German Design Award along the way.

Colour told the story: instead of another monochrome dress dial, the blues encode urban nature — sky, water, glass facades.

The power reserve was treated as a character, not a complication: its off-centre aperture intentionally irritates the layout and shifts the logo.

Proportion came from a rule system — Fibonacci hints on circle sizes and distances — explored through dozens of iterations rather than one sketch.

A constraint can be the feature: the power reserve that 'breaks the harmony' becomes the beauty spot — deliberate imperfection gives a controlled design its life.

The ice blue joins a Metro family now in its twelfth year and sixteenth model. At the Nomos Forum in late September, where hundreds of the brand's global friends and ambassadors gathered in Glashütte, Braun observed the blue working across warm skin tones and different styles — 'strength without being loud.' No sales figures have been published.