---
title: "Bloc: A Watch Face Built From Ten Blocks of Color"
description: "Customize Bloc, a free Garmin watch face with ten metric tiles, four color themes and on-watch health trends. See features and watch compatibility."
canonical_url: "https://runima.fit/blog/bloc-garmin-watchface"
---

> Index of every page on this site: [llms.txt](https://runima.fit/llms.txt)

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.

<callout color="info" icon="i-ph-info">

Bloc is a standalone watch face, not a companion app. It runs entirely on your
watch, works independently of the Runima web app, and doesn't sync, connect, or
share data with Runima — or with anything else.

</callout>

## 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, or leave
a slot blank. Forty choices are grouped into six categories on the watch, so picking one is
a couple of taps rather than a long scroll:

- **Activity** — Steps, Distance, Calories, Active Calories, Floors Climbed, Floors
Descended, Intensity Minutes, Move Bar
- **Body** — Heart Rate, Stress, Body Battery, Breathing Rate, Recovery Time, Pulse Ox,
VO₂max, Skin Temperature
- **Device** — Date, Day and Date, AM/PM, Seconds, Notifications, Phone Connection, Watch
Battery
- **Weather** — current conditions, Feels Like, Today's High and Low, Humidity, UV Index,
Wind Speed, Elevation, Barometric Pressure, Sunrise/Sunset
- **Weekly Totals** — Distance, Steps, Floors Climbed, Calories, Active Minutes
- **Wheelchair** — Pushes, Push Distance

The date follows your watch's language, so French, German, Spanish and other Latin-alphabet
languages see their own day and month names. A tile with no data shows a quiet "--", never
a guess.

## Track your trends

Open Bloc's on-device settings and tap **Trends** for the history of **VO₂max**, **Stress**,
**Body Battery** (daily low and high) and **Resting Heart Rate**. Three overview pages — 90,
30 and 14 days — line up how every metric has moved, green when it moves the healthy way and
red when it doesn't. Each metric then gets its own 90-day chart with separate 90-day and
30-day trend badges, so a long-term shift doesn't hide behind a recent dip. All history is
computed and stored on the watch.

## 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.

## How Bloc has grown

- **July 2026 launch** — ten tiles, the two-block clock, forty colors, four themes, and
Outline and Night Mode, with seventeen everyday stats to fill the tiles.
- **Later updates** — the metric list grew to forty, in six categories, adding VO₂max, Skin
Temperature, detailed weather, weekly totals, wheelchair metrics and clock tiles for the
date, AM/PM and seconds. Dates started following the watch's language.
- **Latest release** — Trends came to Bloc, with the same charts and 90/30/14-day overviews
as Dotpace, along with a fix for a rare Settings crash on lower-memory watches.

## 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, your watch's last known location for sunrise and sunset, and your profile
only when Active Calories or VO₂max is shown. Trends history stays on the watch. 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](https://apps.garmin.com/apps/b2e682f1-f9f1-42bb-9a22-597295a48600).

---

*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.*

## Sitemap

See the full [sitemap](https://runima.fit/sitemap.md) for all pages.
