A character you’d get sick of in a week, if it showed up more.
Doable in-house, and nobody else at this price had one.
Anarc 2 needed something to separate it in a crowded price segment. Three of us from product and two designers met daily for about a week, and the idea that survived was a character.
My colleague sketched the first versions by hand and we worked out the form together. The exploration then moved to Figma and to me — the circular body, the eyes, a lot of colour rounds, and eventually the one we shipped. He animated it.
The harder question wasn’t what Mylo looked like. It was where he’s allowed to appear.
On a watch you glance at fifty times a day, a character that turns up constantly stops being charming inside a week.
So Mylo appears in three places and nowhere else. The guided tour that follows the welcome isn’t Mylo — it’s a plain sequence of screens, on purpose.
- 01 · First boot
- Welcoming you the first time you switch the watch on, or after a reset.
- 02 · Reminders
- Water, sleep, movement, medicine — the nudges that need a face.
- 03 · Canvas AI
- Through the watchface generation flow, including when it fails.
They were supposed to move.
Mylo actually drinking the water, actually lifting the weight. Video on every reminder cost more memory than we had, so they had to be still frames.
A still frame has to hold on its own, and flat shapes weren’t going to. So Mylo got proper light and shadow — enough depth that a single frame reads as a character rather than a sticker — and the props became 3D to match.
Before Mylo, these reminders were plain icons. Now the character is doing the thing you’re being reminded to do.
Marketing wrote the copy. We specified which reminders needed to exist.
The character is most useful in the moments the product is least useful.
Open Canvas AI without your phone connected and it’s Mylo asking you to reconnect. When the voice input doesn’t land, it’s Mylo asking you to say it again.
He doesn’t appear every time the phone disconnects — only when the disconnection is actually blocking something. Same restraint as the three-places rule, one level down.
He’s also the icon. Canvas AI turns a spoken prompt into a watchface, so I gave Mylo a paintbrush and that became the feature’s mark.
Canvas AI turns a spoken prompt into a watchface — so the icon is Mylo with a paintbrush
There’s no evidence yet that any of this landed. Until 21 September 2026 nobody outside the company had met Mylo. Now everyone who buys one does. I think the restraint is right, but “I think” is all I have.
Mylo is co-authored. My colleague sketched the first versions by hand and animated the final character; the form was decided together. The Figma exploration and the final direction were mine, as were the decisions about where Mylo appears and the reminder screens — approved by my design manager. The copy was written by our marketing head.
Most of the work on Mylo was deciding where he doesn’t go.