Today Google announced it’s releasing more than 40 new Android Wear watch faces and devoting an entire section of the Google Play store to the category. The company commissioned more than 15 artists and designers for the job. This isn’t a surprising move—every Android Wear timepiece comes loaded with a set of pre-packaged faces, and developers have created their own custom versions since Android Wear launched this summer. But it does show that Google's interested in exploring the watch face's potential as a touch point for our digital lives—one that might go beyond simply telling time.

The face is the first thing you notice about a watch. On digital versions, the face’s role is multi-functional: It’s an expression of your personal taste and style. It tells the time. It’s an entry point to a richer world of interaction that’s only a swipe or tap away. But it’s not just about decorative customization. Some designers are betting that the face will become a mode of interaction in its own right. “Traditionally a watch face is restricted by real world physicality,” says Toph Brown, a producer at design firm Ustwo. “But on a digital watch face you can do so much more.”

Ustwo New York designed 18 of Google's new watch faces and worked with the company to build the watch face framework, a set of guidelines for Android Wear developers to use when creating their own designs. The big goal is to encourage developers to create something “authentically digital,” a Google-approved phrase that's meant to distinguish smartwatches from their mechanical counterpart. So how do you design a watch face that can exist only in pixels? Ustwo has some ideas.

Take a Cue From History

On mechanical watches any feature beyond telling time is called a complication. This sounds more negative than it is. Chronographs, power reserves, tourbillions, multiple time zones, moon phases—all of these complications are considered the mark of technical prowess in the traditional watch world. “Digital devices are fundamentally different,” says Brett Lider, Android Wear’s head of design. For all the capabilities of smartwatch, the most effective digital design is often an exercise in restraint.

To start, smartwatches have limited real estate. “If you’re Patek Philipe or Panerai, you have the luxury of using atoms to make beautiful shapes,” says Brown, "Pixels are huge in comparison, so the number of complications we can reasonably fit on the watch face and retain its beauty is much smaller.” All of the Ustwo designs are meant to be “glanceable." It shouldn’t take more than one second to glean information from the faces, which means they need to be clear and simple.

A display of Android Wear's new watch faces. USTWO

This is easy to do when your only task is coming up with an inventive design for telling time. Even the more abstract watch faces, like Ustwo’s Parallel design, which uses three graphic dials to tell the time, accomplishes this with ease. The goal becomes considerably more complicated once you begin integrating data into the face.

Remember, Time Is Contextual

The interesting thing about time is that everyone experiences it differently. “It’s not always number number, colan, number number,” says Brown. For some people, time is the 15 minutes before their next meeting. For others, it’s number of calories burned every hour. Some people best relate to time through a weather forecast, others through their hobbies. Time is contextual, and Google, more than any other company, is remarkably good at contextualizing our lives thanks to its trove of data.

A small but growing number of faces Google released are pulling in data from apps to make faces more functional than decorative. For example, Surfline developed a face that pulls in the service’s surf forecast data, alerting Android Wear users to favorable conditions. Ustwo developed four data-integrated faces that pull in calendar and weather data. One, called Albumen, visualizes your appointments time as a colorful blob, giving you a basic layer of information that tells you whether you’re busy or free.

Albumen is a good example of why data-integrated watch faces aren’t quite apps—the interaction is so lightweight (or nonexistent), you could hardly consider them as such. It’s easier to think of these watch faces more as miniaturized billboards for whatever bits of information the wearers deem important enough to sit on the base layer of their smartwatch experience. Of course, it’s possible that some developers will treat the watch face as a dashboard, pulling in whatever data they can get their hands on. Though it seems like a heavy-handed approach given a new watch face is a swipe away.

That’s not to say the watch face isn’t a prime opportunity for exciting forms of interaction. It’s fun to imagine the watch face as an interface to communicate with a single designated friend. Or using time as an element in gaming. Ustwo envisions a game controlled by your heartbeat that could augment gameplay on your phone or tablet. “Or consider a ‘screenless’ game that is played solely through the motion of your arm and vibrations on your wrist,” says Brown.

Ask Google why a watch face is important, and they’ll tell you it’s about making your watch your own personal statement to the world. As vanilla as that answer can be, it's true. The most exciting part of wearables really is about customization. Just not colors or graphics, but the kind of customization that makes our lives better and easier with just a single glance.