Cuban Rainer Orellana Yedra awarded by Samsung as the best watch face designer of 2020

December 25, 2020

"I live in Montevideo, a charming city, very lively and that brings me many memories of Cuba because it has neighborhoods with architecture similar to several areas of Havana," says Orellana, father of two small children aged eight and two years old. The Cuban has just been awarded by the Samsung business group as the best watch face designer of 2020 in the wearables category. As a good designer and entrepreneur, he knew from the beginning that High Watch Faces had to be his business name.

"My interest in technology comes from when I was young, I always liked science fiction movies and everything related to computing and digital art," he assures. Although he studied architecture for several years, he never finished the degree. Later he chose graphic design in a self-taught manner. "I took several courses and participated in workshops related to this area, and that's when my passion for design and creation of digital products began."

"In Cuba I met my partner, who is from Ecuador, and two years later, due to job opportunities for her, we came to live in Uruguay."

Rainier left Cuba married to an Ecuadorian woman and settled for a few years in Quito. At first he had great support from his wife's family. Later he moved to Uruguay.

For a time he was a freelancer and there were months when he couldn't find work, so he had to stretch the little money that was left until he could get paid. Little by little things improved. He began working for local companies, his wife was also more stable with her job, and nowadays they don't live luxuriously, but they lack nothing.

Uruguay is a country that strongly promotes entrepreneurship and has grown a lot in the technological field in recent years. Any person can create their own single-person business or partnership relatively easily. Furthermore, there are many collaborative work spaces (coworking) that are equipped with everything necessary to arrive with your personal equipment and instantly be set up working. Also, the great advantage of these places is that since they bring together many people from various professional sectors, you always have someone from marketing nearby, or a systems engineer who can lend you a hand when you need it. In his case he was set up in a shared office for a few months until "for health reasons related to the pandemic" he was forced to work from home.

He started designing smartwatch faces as a result of a competition launched by Google and Fossil in 2015. He researched a bit about design tools and found a platform called Facer.io, where he could create designs, assemble them and publish them.
His interest increased when he saw that the first project was being downloaded hundreds of times each day. Weeks later he managed to enter the Premium Designers program where he could sell his watch faces. At that moment he understood that his addiction to details was worth the many hours of work on each design. He currently also has products there for devices with Google Wear OS.

Years later, while working as a UX/UI designer (useful for users, as well as visually attractive) in various software companies and startups, he collaborated with an Uruguayan friend on his venture, which a year earlier had also been awarded by Samsung. At the beginning of 2020 he decided to develop his own products for Galaxy Store with the tools they provide to developers.

Rainier thinks he will continue collaborating with Samsung and also try to cover other platforms, such as Huawei and Apple. Both companies have smartwatches in their product portfolio and are preparing stores so developers can sell their applications. He also wants to venture into the automotive sector, creating digital interfaces for various car components, but we have to wait for better conditions to be created for this to happen.