Creating the Dashboard Clock

So today i was just thinking of what exactly can i write about and maybe even give a few hints to people out there in the fields of designing with Photoshop. So an idea of creating the Dashboard Clock from my MacBook seemed amusing to me so i decided to go with it. I was doing this the first time so there might be some rough edges since i never edited but it should give you the basic understanding. By the way those who were wondering about the wallpaper, the current one used is created by me and the tutorial is coming shortly.

I just want to let you guys know that this tutorial is for more advanced users of Photoshop so if your just starting out, you might not exactly get everything as its not so detailed. We will start by creating the base of the clock with the drop shadow so you can play with the setting of the drop shadow, mine was set to aproximately 50%.

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Now we will have to create the shiny look. Please add noise both to your glare and your base as it will look more official compared to the Dashboard Clock.

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Now we have to create the clock it self so take out your Elliptical Tool and draw in a circle on top of your glare layer and fill it in with black. Now add the border around the black circle with the hex indicated below.

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Now we have to create the glare so if you want to get more detailed view, you can just follow my way. Place the original clock design near yours and draw a white circle inside the black circle about 1 or 2 pixels apart. After that grab your eraser tool and set the opacity to 75% and slowly brush from the top until you get something like mine. I also added a small tiny border around the glare just to make it look a little nicer.

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Now we have to add all the digits inside. I personally liked how Arial Narrow looked on it so i added that font although i think Mac's designer used some other font that i am not familiar with or maybe just missed.

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Create a white circle in the center of the digits. Following that draw another red circle inside the white circle center so you should end up having something like this.

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Now by the alignment of the arrows on the clock, use your white circle as the base and grab your pen tool to draw out one of the arrows. Just by connecting to one side of the base of the circle and extending towards the numbered digit and then following back to the opposite base of the circle, you can easily achieve those fancy arrows. Repeat the steps again to create the short arrow as well.

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Now place the long arrow layer underneath the white and red circle layer. Following by going to the Settings of the circle and adding a dropshadow of about 75% opacity with the color filling of black. After you have done that, grab your line tool and set th weight to 2px and draw a line from the red circle to the selected digit on the seconds.

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Now your basically done, just grab your text tool and add the State and the AM/PM indicator on top. If your curious about the colors, you can just take the hex of the original design. Your final result should look like this:

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Compared to:

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Not bad right?Almost identical!