When nearing the completion of my first watch there were two glaring details yet to be determined. A name, and logo.
The logo came first and can be seen as the thumbnail for this site. I wanted something that could work with all of my projects and not just this watch, and I have continued to be happy with this design and it appears on nearly all of my projects.
If making the logo was a painful process, picking out a name was excruciating. Trying to find a name for a multi year project that adequately conveys the intention of the design and the journey taken to get there is difficult. One thing was required though, the name needed to be a reflection of the watch, It couldn’t be a version number or some other kind of ‘easy way out’.
The watch was an obsession, everything was important, every detail had its reason. In the hunt for a name to convey this obsession I came across a short story by Jorge Luis Borges titled “The Aleph”.
In Borges’ story, the Aleph is a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion (“The Aleph”).
This idea of the Aleph perfectly summed up the deliberateness of every action in designing and manufacturing of my watch, where every detail, from every angle was important and there for a reason. While this was my first time hearing the word Aleph, I soon discovered the long history of the word appearing as hieroglyphs in the ancient world and its current use as the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet where the spelling is Alef.
Applied Engineering and Design 