Atelier 36: I Built a Luxury Watch Face for My Amazfit Balance 2 (and It’s Free)

Earlier this year I got a health wake-up call. I’m a software engineer, which mostly means sitting: debugging, meetings, more debugging. Sitting most of the day certainly wasn’t doing me any favours, so I decided to start looking after myself properly.

For me that meant running, three or four mornings a week. I’ve run on and off for years, and every time it does something for me that no other exercise does. This time I wanted to do it properly: better cadence, faster pace, real personal bests. So I needed a watch.

After far too much research (Garmin was tempting; maybe one day), I picked the Amazfit Balance 2. It does everything I need and nothing I don’t: a sports watch that is built well enough to wear all day.

There was one problem. Every watch face I found looked like a fitness dashboard. I wanted something that looked like a high-end mechanical watch: elegant, classic, quietly expensive. I couldn’t find one that fit.

I write code for a living, and AI tools like Claude have changed what one person can build in a weekend. So instead of scrolling through hundreds of faces, I built my own, with Claude as my pair programmer. And no, I am not a watchmaker. I just stare at watch faces far more than a reasonable person should.

Meet Atelier 36. It is free on the Zepp store, and this post doubles as its user guide.

What it is

Atelier 36 is a classic analog watch face for the Amazfit Balance 2. The goal was simple: when you glance at your wrist, it should feel like a dress watch, not a screen. So there is a guilloché sunburst dial, faceted applied markers that catch the light, polished hands with slim lume channels, a soft sapphire-crystal glare and proper shadows under the hands.

The name comes from the second hand. Most smartwatch faces tick once a second. Atelier 36 sweeps in ten small steps every second, the way a 36,000 beats-per-hour high-beat movement does. It is a small thing, and it is the thing I look at the most.

A quick tour of the dial

• Weather and temperature sit just under 12.
• The date window shows weekday, day and month.
• Four rings show your stats. Each one is editable (more on that below).
• The calendar icon at 6 o’clock is a shortcut to Zepp Coach.
• The second hand sweeps smoothly instead of ticking.

Six themes, one watch

Same watch, six moods. You switch between them on the watch itself, no phone needed.

Top row: Gold on Black, Steel & Navy, Rose & Chocolate. Bottom row: Emerald & Gold, Silver Opaline, Stealth.

My personal favourite is Steel & Navy. Silver Opaline is the one that surprises people: a light dial with black sub-dials and blued-steel hands.

User guide

1. Install it

1. Open the Zepp app on your phone with your Balance 2 connected.
2. Go to Device → Watch Faces and search for Atelier 36.
3. Tap Install. Once it is on the watch, it becomes your active face.

2. Customise the rings and theme

1. On the watch, long-press the face and tap Edit.
2. You will see a circle on each ring, labelled RING 1 to RING 4, and one in the middle labelled THEME.
3. Tap a circle, then scroll or swipe through the options. The bubble shows the name of the current choice.
4. Confirm to save. Your choices stay until you change them again.

3. Pick what each ring shows

Every ring can show steps, heart rate, calories, battery, SpO2, stress, PAI, sleep, VO2 max, training load, recovery time or readiness. The ring fills as you make progress, and each metric has its own colour so you can read the face at a glance. If your watch doesn’t provide one of these metrics, it simply won’t appear in the list.

4. Use the tap shortcuts

Tap any ring to jump straight into that metric’s app, for example Steps opens Activity. Tap the calendar icon at 6 o’clock to open Zepp Coach and see your next session.

5. Turn on the always-on display

1. On the watch, go to Settings → Display → Always-on Display.
2. Turn it on and set the style to Follow watch face.
3. Lower your wrist. You get a clean white-on-black version of the dial, with lume that glows green like the real thing. The animated second hand rests to save battery.

Why it’s free

I wanted to sell it. It turns out paid watch faces on the Zepp store are currently only open to certified companies based in Mainland China. So I made a different decision: if I can’t earn from it, other Balance 2 owners can at least enjoy it. Atelier 36 is free, with every theme and feature included. No locked “premium” version.

And honestly, I think that is a missed opportunity for Zepp, not just for me. According to Zepp’s own developer documentation, only certified corporate developers in Mainland China can publish paid watch faces or apps. For everyone else, the answer is simply that it is “currently not supported by the official channel.”

The Balance 2 is a genuinely capable watch, and a platform like this lives or dies by its developers. When independent developers everywhere else have no way to earn from their work, many of them will quietly build for other platforms instead, and the store ends up with fewer polished watch faces and apps. Google Play, Samsung’s Galaxy Store and Garmin’s Connect IQ store all let developers in many countries sell their work. I would love to see Zepp open paid listings to developers worldwide. It would make the platform better for every Amazfit owner.

If it makes your wrist a little happier and you’d like to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee. Completely optional, always appreciated.

A peek behind the dial

For the developers reading this (hello, both of you): nothing on the face is hand-drawn. A Python script renders every image, from the guilloché rays to the bevels on each marker, at six times the screen resolution and then scales it down so the edges stay crisp. All the colours and positions live in a single config file, which is why adding a theme is mostly a matter of writing down a palette. The watch side is plain JavaScript on Zepp OS, with tests that check things like “do the rings overlap the numerals” before anything reaches my wrist.

The hardest bug? The always-on screen went completely black. The code ran fine, every step reported success, and still nothing. It turned out the watch rebuilds the face when it dims, and creating all the full-screen images in that mode left the always-on screen blank. Building only the always-on parts fixed it. Classic: the bug was not in what I did wrong, but in what I did at all.

Full circle

A few months ago this started with a wake-up call and a pair of running shoes. Today the same watch does two jobs. At 6 a.m. it tracks my runs, my cadence and my recovery, and the rings on the dial tell me at a glance whether I’ve earned that rest day. At 10 a.m. it sits on my wrist in a meeting looking like a proper dress watch, not a gadget.

That was the whole point. I wanted one watch that keeps me honest about my health and still looks good with a shirt. Every time I glance down and see that second hand gliding across the dial, it looks clean, simple and, honestly, beautiful. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and a little proud too.

If you own a Balance 2 and wanted something more classic, I hope Atelier 36 does the same for you.

Feedback welcome

This is version 1.0, and I’m wearing it every day. If something looks off on your watch, or you have an idea for a seventh theme, leave a comment below. I read all of them.