How to customize your Garmin watch face (built-in and Connect IQ)
Garmin watches run two kinds of faces, and each is customized in a different place. Knowing which kind you are looking at saves you from hunting through menus that do not have what you want.
Published 2026-07-183 min read
First, which kind of face is it?
Faces that shipped with the watch are built-in: they are customized entirely
on the wrist. Faces you installed from the Connect IQ store are apps, and their settings
live in the Connect IQ app on your phone. The split feels arbitrary until you
know it, then it is consistent everywhere.
Customizing a built-in face
Hold UP (button models) or hold the touchscreen (Vivoactive, Venu Sq) to open the face carousel.
Scroll to the face and choose Customize instead of applying it.
Work through the options: Layout (how many data fields), Data (what each field shows), Accent Color, and on some models hands style or background.
Back out; changes apply immediately.
The exact option list varies by model and by face; AMOLED models generally offer more.
Nothing here needs the phone.
Customizing a Connect IQ face
Open the Connect IQ app with the watch connected.
Open your device, find the face under your installed watch faces and tap it.
Open Settings. Everything the face can do is here: colors, data field pickers, format toggles.
Save. The changes travel to the watch over Bluetooth within seconds.
If the settings page refuses to open or comes up blank, that is a known app glitch with a
reliable fix sequence, covered in
our settings-on-phone guide.
What the on-watch Customize menu can do for store faces
Store faces can also appear in the watch's Customize menu, but only with the shortcuts
their developer exposed there. It is usually a short list on purpose: quick things like
accent color or a style switch, so you can restyle from the wrist without the phone. Our
own faces follow that pattern (accent and style on the watch, everything else in the app).
If an option you expect is missing on the wrist, it is not hidden, it is on the phone.
Frequently asked
Why can I not pick which metric shows in each field on the watch?
For Connect IQ faces that choice is phone-side by design: the per-field pickers live in the face settings in the Connect IQ app. The on-watch Customize menu only carries the handful of options the developer put there, typically colors and styles.
The settings will not open or show a blank page in the Connect IQ app.
A known glitch, usually cured by force-closing the app, opening Garmin Connect until the watch connects, and trying again. Our settings-on-phone guide walks through the whole fix sequence.
Do my settings reset when I switch to another face and back?
No. Each face remembers its own settings, both built-in and Connect IQ ones. Switching faces for a week and coming back restores everything as you left it.
Can I build my own face instead?
Garmin’s Face It feature in the Connect app turns a photo into a simple face, and it is fine for that. For layouts, data and typography beyond a photo background you are choosing among Connect IQ faces, which is the niche we work in.