Shopping With Shawn Liu and Danny Wen

DANNY WEN and Shawn Liu, Web designers in New York, are fascinated by the concept of time. So much so that many of their ventures revolve around it.

The two own Iridesco, a Web design company, and their greatest success so far has been a project called Harvest — online time-tracking software designed to help small businesses keep tabs on billable hours, expenses, invoices and projects.

The World Clock Project, a Web site that encourages users to upload photographs of public clocks from around the world, is another of their time-related enterprises, albeit a less conventional one. The goal of the site, Worldclockproject.org — which Mr. Liu dreamed up after he stopped relying on watches and cellphones, and began to pay more attention to public clocks instead — is to gather enough pictures to represent every minute of the day with a different clock.

Why? “Aside from telling us the time,” they explain on the site, “these pictures of unfamiliar clocks take us to a different place and remind us of the vastness of the world.”

The hundreds of images collected so far reflect a range of styles, from an Art Deco clock outside a chocolate factory in Riga, Latvia, to a ball-shaped clock with slashes instead of numbers at a store in Stockholm.

To mark the start of daylight time — one of the few occasions when other people may pay as much attention to time as Mr. Wen and Mr. Liu do — they visited a number of SoHo stores and Web sites looking for interesting and unusual clocks.

At Matter, a home-accessories shop, they appreciated the design of Sebastian Wrong’s Font Clock, which registers the time, day and month in 12 typefaces that change at random.

At BDDW, which specializes in handmade furnishings, they liked the Nixie clock, with its artful bronze or wood case and its glowing, cathode time display.

Of the many styles available at CB2, Mr. Liu preferred the Spot wall clock, because of its red arms and its size — a little more than three feet in diameter. And at Z Gallerie, Mr. Wen praised the minimalism and simplicity of an extremely narrow brushed-aluminum Pendulum clock.

When it came to clocks that required more than a glance to figure out the time, Mr. Liu was lukewarm. “I like a clock that looks like a clock,” he said.

Not so Mr. Wen, who admired the Just a Moment clock from Fluke Collective, an online store. Its second, minute and hour hands are displayed on separate faces — a nice departure, he said, “from the same old clock.”