Just a little bit of time iterating on ideas. There wasn't much structure to this. I played around with colors and gradients. These colors ended up really weird, but it was still interesting to work with. Looked a bit into icons, but it feels to hard to really understand what works best, what looks good.
At this point in the design process I wish I had some more direction and maybe experience. I'm just kind of throwing things out there, experimenting.
Are you designing it for web or mobile?
It might be nice to start to experiment with how visuals interplay with the interactivity of using the app so that you can establish a more solid footing for yourself of what this all manifests as in the end.
I'm actually trying to design it for desktop, specifically Mac.
I'm curious how exactly that would play out in practice (btw, I really appreciate the advice!). Since it's a very basic feature set, I'm not looking to do much...
There are ideas of animating the clock, animating the hover state of the button to display the "action" rather than the "state", perhaps that's somewhere you mean I should explore 🤔 .
Try putting it in a Mac app’s chrome (like menu bar with traffic lights). I think that will make it feel more real, give you a sense of scale, and make it more apparent what you need to work on still. You can probably find a template in Figma Community!