Big & Clear help guide

Privacy at a glance: the face has no account, network connection, location permission or telemetry. It reads the watch clock and local activity-monitor values only.

Install and open it

Open Garmin Connect IQ on your phone and search for Big & Clear.
Install it, then select it from your watch's watch-face picker. Garmin may ask you to sync before the new face appears.
Open the Connect IQ app's settings for the face. There are no on-watch menus required for the baseline configuration.

Choose the look

Color scheme: white, yellow, cyan or green on black, or black on white for bright daylight.
Top field / bottom field: each can be Off, Steps, Heart rate, Battery or Calories. They are independent; turning both off leaves a clean clock.
Show date: displays the weekday, month and day in a readable line. Turn it off when you want the time to dominate.
Show seconds: seconds are shown while the display is awake when enabled. They are intentionally removed in sleep/low-power rendering.
Leading zero: choose whether a one-digit hour has a leading zero. The 12/24-hour choice follows the watch's own setting.

Important: what the heart-rate field means

The watch-face heart-rate field is not an instant activity reading. Big & Clear requests one sample from Garmin's local heart-rate history and caches it for the current minute. It may therefore be older than the pulse shown inside a running activity, and it can show -- when Garmin has no valid history sample.

For a live, current workout heart rate in a large number, use Big & Clear Activity inside the activity instead.

Sleep, AMOLED and MIP behavior

On AMOLED watches in low power/always-on mode, the face switches to a black background with one medium-gray time and periodically shifts its position to reduce static-pixel wear.
On MIP watches, the full layout remains available at the watch's normal minute-level sleep cadence; seconds are not drawn while asleep.
When the display wakes, the selected color, fields, date and seconds return.

Troubleshooting

The face or a setting does not appear

Sync Connect IQ, confirm that the face is selected in the watch-face picker, then reopen its settings. If a value was corrupted or outside the valid range, the app falls back to a safe default.

A field shows `--`

That means Garmin did not provide a valid local value at that update. Heart-rate history, steps and calories can be unavailable depending on the watch state; the face does not invent a health value.

The numbers look too small or clipped

Remove one or both optional fields and hide the date. On a small or rectangular slot, the platform may have less safe area than the preview suggests.

Known Venu Sq limitation: Venu Sq is included in the app's compatibility list, but some rectangular layouts can make third-party watch-face text smaller or less comfortable to read than the round full-screen examples. The guide does not hide that limitation: try the clean clock configuration and report the exact Venu Sq model and firmware if it remains unreadable.

Get help

Include the exact Garmin model, firmware, app version, selected fields and whether the display was awake or in low power. Do not send an activity file or personal data for a first report. Contact support.

Big & Clear