Bloc: A Watch Face Built From Ten Blocks of Color

Bloc is a block-grid watch face for Garmin Connect IQ devices: ten solid color tiles arranged around a two-block clock. It's live on the Connect IQ Store today, free, built by the same team behind Runima.

Where Dotpace, our other watch face, keeps almost everything quiet — a rounded dot-matrix digit, a handful of stats, mostly negative space — Bloc does the opposite. Every stat gets its own tile, and every tile gets its own color: steps in lime, heart rate in rose, stress in amber, body battery in sky blue. Ten tiles ring a clock built from exactly two blocks, one for the hour and one for the minute, each with its own background and digit color.

Forty colors, four shortcuts

All ten tiles, plus the background and both time blocks, can be set independently from forty Tailwind-inspired tones — sixteen bright shades, sixteen deeper ones, plus white, black, cool grey, warm grey and fuchsia. That's thirteen separate color pickers if you want to hand-tune every pixel.

Most people won't bother, so Bloc also ships four built-in themes that recolor the whole face in one tap. Vivid is bold and saturated. Muted is the same layout in deeper, quieter tones. Mono strips it down to white, black and grey. Rainbow sweeps a smooth hue gradient around the tile ring so no two tiles land on quite the same shade. Pick one and move on, or use it as a starting point and override individual tiles from there — both paths use the same settings menu.

Ten tiles, your call

Every tile is a generic metric slot. Fill the ring with whatever you actually check: Steps, Heart Rate, Stress, Body Battery, Breathing Rate, Recovery Time, Watch Battery, Calories, Active Calories, Floors, Distance, Intensity Minutes, Pulse Ox, Weather, Notifications, Sunrise/Sunset, Phone Connection — or leave a slot blank. A tile with no data shows a quiet "--", never a guess.

Solid by day, outline by night

Outline Mode turns every block from a filled tile into a colored border with matching text — same information, far fewer lit pixels. Night Mode switches to outline automatically between sunset and sunrise, so the face dims itself without you touching a setting. On AMOLED watches that means less light after dark; on any display, it's just a different look for the same layout.

Built to fit, not just to scale

Bloc ships its own hand-tuned resources for seven screen resolutions — 218, 240, 260, 280, 360, 416 and 454 pixels — instead of one layout stretched across all of them. That's the difference between running on a 218px Fenix 5S and a 454px Fenix 8 and actually looking right on both. 12-/24-hour and metric/imperial follow your watch's own settings; there's no separate toggle for either.

Shaped by feedback

Bloc runs on the same rule Dotpace does: user requests decide what gets built. The forty colors, the four themes, the ten open metric slots — each maps back to something people asked for. We build to the edge of what Connect IQ's SDK allows for a given request, and this release covers everything the platform currently permits for what's been asked so far.

Nothing leaves the watch

Bloc only reads what a tile needs to draw itself: the time, the stats you choose to show, current weather, and your watch's last known location for sunrise and sunset. No accounts, no analytics, no network requests. Everything is computed and rendered on-device, and nothing is collected, stored off-device, or sent anywhere, including to Runima.

Get it

Bloc is available now, free, on the Connect IQ Store — search "Bloc" from the Connect IQ app on your phone or at apps.garmin.com.

Garmin®, Connect IQ™, and the Garmin logo are trademarks of Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries, registered in the USA and other countries, and are used here only to describe compatibility. Bloc is a third-party application built with the Connect IQ SDK; Runima and Bloc are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Garmin.