Garmin Asset Generator

Automating background generation for all Garmin screen sizes

November 2025

Building watch faces like my Chinese and Cyberpunk designs is a lot of fun, but also very tedious. One of the biggest challenges is Garmin’s many screen sizes and resolutions.

The Problem

Garmin doesn’t have a single screen size. There are at least a dozen different resolutions, from 240x240 on older devices to 454x454 on the newest Amoled ones. Some are square, some are round. If you want your watch face to look good on all of them, you have to manually resize all your background assets.

The Solution

I built a Python-based Garmin Asset Generator to solve this.

Features

• Background Generation: Can draw two different gradient background patterns by taking two colors.
• Image Resizer: Accepts a percentage of the screen the image should fill (e.g., a logo should be 20% of the screen width).
• Documentation: Includes a DEVICES.md file to record which devices have which screen size and shape

By using this tool, I can focus more on the design and logic of my watch faces and less on the repetitive task of exporting dozens of images.

How It Works

The tool is a Python script that can execute a few commands for generating images. It reads a configuration file listing the target Garmin devices and their resolutions.

The gradient backgrounds are very useful. Rather than opening Photoshop or Figma for every new device, I pass in two hex colors and the script interpolates between them based on a pattern — either radial or linear — and saves a correctly-sized PNG for each resolution. Changing the color scheme of a watch face is now a one-line config change. I intend on adding more background patterns like this as well.

Before and After

Before this tool, adding support for a new Garmin device meant:

1. Opening an image editor
2. Resizing the background to the new dimensions
3. Manually scaling any logos or decorative elements
4. Saving and renaming the file
5. Dropping it into the correct folder in the Connect IQ project

Now it’s one command. The folder is populated automatically.

Future Features

• Splash logo generation: Each device has specific sizing for the splash icon, and I want this tool to be able to handle that.
• More docs: Including links to other docs, tutorials, color guides, and font tools can make the repo a great companion to have while developing a Garmin app.