There are more than two ways to display the time. There are a few project ideas in my head to create clocks that don't use digits or hands but tell you the time in non-conventional ways. At some point I wanted to make a clock that uses a method that I've never seen or heard of before. I came up with one that uses colour scales for hours, minutes and seconds. This is the one i have actually built.
I chose a picture from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic that's related to time. Fans of the show know why I called it Tardie. Three parts of the picture are laser etched in three sheets of acrylic. Each sheet has RGB LEDs on its side so each sheet can be individually lit in a different colour. An Arduino Pro Mini and a realtime clock module control the colours of the three LED strips.
So you can tell the hours by looking at the colour of the pony (hours - horse), the minutes from the colour of the mane (minutes - mane) and the seconds from the eye colour (seconds - seducing eyes). The idea was that by looking at it multiple times a day, then looking at an actual clock, you could learn to tell the time almost instantly by looking at the colours. But I didn't get around to print the colour scale for reference, yet. And I don't hape room for the thing on my desk anyway. There is a clock on my screen that doesn't take up so much space. So I can only say that it works in theory.