The asterisk earned its name from the Greek word for little star, and most of us spend our whole lives treating it as a footnote marker, the small thing that points at some other, more important thing. Raw Color, the Eindhoven studio behind STELLAR, looked at that humble little glyph and decided it deserved top billing. Their new watch for Anicorn’s Trio of Time series puts three asterisks right on the dial, in orange, green, and pink, and sets the whole lot spinning. It is the rare watch where the punctuation is the point.
Here is the clever bit. Each asterisk is a hand, and one arm on each carries a single colored dot, and that dot is what actually tells you the hour, the minute, and the second. The arms turn at their own speeds, so the dial keeps rearranging itself into loose, blooming star shapes that drift apart and then occasionally lock back into clean symmetry. Humans once stared up at actual stars to figure out what time it was and which way to sail home. STELLAR takes those stars, abstracts them into typography, scatters them across a cobalt face, and somehow still tells you it is quarter past three.
Designer: Raw Color (Christoph Brach & Daniera ter Haar)
The studio behind it has spent years treating color as a material rather than a finishing touch, and that pedigree matters here. Christoph Brach and Daniera ter Haar have shaped work for Adidas, IKEA, Hermès, Samsung, and the Van Gogh Museum, with pieces sitting in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. You can feel that discipline in STELLAR’s palette, where signal orange, bottle green, and pale lilac sit against a deep royal blue without any one of them shouting over the others. The colors are doing structural work, separating the three rotating layers so your eye can actually track which star belongs to which unit of time. It looks playful, almost Memphis, but the restraint underneath is the giveaway that grown-ups made this.
Anicorn’s Trio of Time platform exists precisely for experiments like this, inviting designers from different cities to reinterpret how a watch tells time, and STELLAR marks the project’s stop in the Netherlands. We covered the liquid-filled Time for Fun and the macOS-inspired Spinning Beach Ball from the same series, and the throughline is always conceptual mischief executed with real horological hardware. STELLAR keeps that promise. Under the graphic fireworks sits a Japanese Miyota 2035 quartz movement, a 39mm 316L stainless steel case that stays impressively thin at 8.7mm, mineral glass, and 5ATM of water resistance. The green leather strap runs 18mm and clicks on through Anicorn’s smart docking system, with a mismatched pink keeper and a blue accent near the buckle that feel entirely intentional.
STELLAR is up for pre-order at 219 dollars with shipping slated for September 2026, which puts it squarely in the accessible end of design-object watchmaking rather than the collector-flex tier. I will be honest, this is a watch that asks something of you. The first few times you glance down, you will hunt for a pointer and find a flower, and you will have to teach your eye to chase the dots instead of the shapes. Whether that friction reads as delightful or annoying depends entirely on what you want from the thing strapped to your wrist. For anyone who likes the idea of telling time by reading a tiny constellation that reassembles itself all day long, the trade feels more than fair.