One of my old BBC chums e-mailed me out of the blue to say she’d spotted my name in one of this year’s A-Level exams!

I pop up in one of the externally set assignments for A-level Art and Design. [thanks for the copy Sue!]

It says: ‘When making your response, refer to appropriate examples that might include the work of Mike Afford …’.

I wonder how many students will choose that question and arrive here looking for appropriate examples..?

Seriously though, if there are any students reading this, please feel free to drop me a line with any questions you may have. I do get quite a few student enquiries, and although it may take a little while getting back to you, I do try my best to answer every one.

I’ve been puzzling over this for a couple of days now. *

I’d noticed that the new BBC Weather website was using a different colour for the sea on their maps.

I’d originally designed the weather maps with a deeper blue for the sea, so I was intrigued to see the colour had changed to a paler, less saturated, and slightly more ‘greeny’ blue (some of the more ‘greeny’ blues I’d previously reserved for light rain).

One of the first effects I noticed was that the actual colour on screen for certain levels of light rain over the sea was virtually identical to that of light cloud.

I suppose it’s just a small point really. It’s still fairly obvious where the rain is – but I was just a bit puzzled as to why a (presumably) cosmetic change to the sea colour should have made the rain data in particular so much more ambiguous and obfuscated.

Anyway – I think I’ve figured out why the new maps don’t look quite right to me. …read more

I was pleased to get contacted a little while back by the guy in charge of the BBC Weather website – among other things he wondered if I’d seen the new beta site, and the fact that the BBC Weather Symbols were making a return. For some reason it feels like the symbols have been gone for ages, but they’ve really only had about 3 years in the wilderness (they’d lingered on the BBC website for a few years after the 2005 relaunch, and only got replaced on the 2008 beta site).

And there they are – back again, just like an old friend!

By the looks of things they’ve had to be tweaked a bit to cope with appearing on white backgrounds, so they have made two sets depending on the background colour. Consequently white clouds appear as grey clouds from time to time, depending on where they sit. I’ll be honest – I think that’s a bit of a shame, and particularly problematic over that map, but hey – they’re such classic icons that it’s just nice to see them back. And it is a beta site after all, so I’m assuming it’s still very much ‘work in progress’.

For the true weather symbol fans, it looks like there’s a new icon for ‘drizzle’ that didn’t appear in the original set (it always used to be single raindrop, same as ‘light rain’ – now it’s a sprinkling of tiny dots). Other weather types like ‘fog’ and ‘mist’ look like they’re staying as plain text.

Also, and a bigger departure from any of the previous symbol ‘relaunches’, they seem to have introduced a complete night-time set with a crescent moon. Funnily enough, I did exactly the same when I designed the first of my own new royalty free weather symbols a few years back, and the BBC team seem to have chosen an almost identical moon phase to mine.

Nice one!

Anyway, there they are. And a very welcome development too.

As always, I’m sure the BBC Weather symbols remain the property of the BBC and they would be unlikely to allow their use elsewhere (although I’ve come across several places where they are being used fairly indiscriminately for profit).

But if you are looking for similar ‘classic’ TV-style weather icons maybe for iPhone or iPad apps, or websites of your own, and you don’t want to risk copyright infringement, then I have an ever growing range of royalty free symbol sets available for download. The ideal guilt-free alternative to ‘borrowing’ the BBC ones.

Oh, and if you’re looking for the ideal Weather Gifts for Christmas – why not check out the range of classic weather symbol t-shirts and hoodies – there’s something for men, women and kids over at the ‘Classic Weather Icons’ Spreadshirt store. You can choose from a range of symbols and also choose the colour of your t-shirt or hoodie. Great fun!

Here’s the recently completed promotional video for the MxV1 – a revolutionary putter with a curved surface that matches the diameter of the golf ball ensuring a perfect hit each time.

The MxV1 Putter is based on the principals of Newton’s Cradle (MxV = mass x velocity = momentum).

“The radius of our putter face is exactly that of a standard US Golf Ball (1.68 inches) and even with a minor tolerance we have found more accurate strikes and optimal roll” says Brian Wittman (inventor of the MxV1) “By essentially striking a ball with another ball, you almost can’t miss the center of gravity.

…read more

A few weeks ago I had to produce a set of bespoke animations based on my ‘old-school’ weather symbols for use in an app – each as a single sheet of individual frames that could be cycled through within the app.

Anyway – it got me thinking about the (’new’) BBC weather icons I designed back in 2005 and whether I could produce a similar set of my own with more realistic weather effects using proper particles and then animate them somehow on a web page without resorting to animated GIFs…

With any luck you’ll be able to see a little ‘light snow showers’ icon looping away on the left there.

For anyone interested, I’ll quickly explain how it’s done… …read more

I recently had a request for a special version of the ‘Window on the Weather’ icon set – basically the whole set, but without the window frame, and at a larger size. So it made sense to adapt the original artwork for Set 4 to produce a brand new weather collection (Set 6!).

Weather Symbol Set 6 comes as a full set of 42 icons, plus 10 bonus alternative icons (more on that later).

They are saved as PNG images at two sizes. Firstly there’s a set at 64×64 pixels which makes them useable from the word go. But for the first time I’ve also included a complete set at the original size (512×512 pixels) – these can be used as backgrounds, or scaled down to whatever size might be needed.

They cover the usual types of weather, and I’ve also included 10 alternate ‘night-time’ symbols without the crescent moon showing, just in case these need to be used in conjunction with real moon-phase data.

Incidentally, the clouds featured in this set are 100% Irish! (The clouds that I used for the current BBC Weather icons when I was working back in London at the Weather Centre were from photos I took in Surrey..)

Anyway. These new weather icons are available to download now. Enjoy!

A variation on the famous Keep Calm and Carry On poster – this new T-shirt design features a classic winter snow weather icon with the slogan Keep Warm and Carry On.

It’s just part of a new range of ‘weather icon’ inspired T-shirts and clothing available now at our Spreadshirt Store – Classic Weather Icons.

And it’s the ideal Christmas gift for the Weather fan in your life…!

See also the ‘Keep Cool’ summer version with a classic sunshine icon. I know that summer’s over now, but the ‘Keep Cool’ T-Shirt would still look great wedged between a couple of hot and sweaty commuters on a packed District Line tube during rush hour.

The final episode of Series 3 of Little Howard’s Big Question is on this afternoon – BBC One 4.30. It’s the ‘Little Howard Awards’ show – so basically another excuse to show all the best bits from the series.

Oh, and there’s also some dancing ants.
 

Just a quick heads up for anyone searching online for the icons that appear on the World Weather Online site.

There’s a number of different weather icon sets available from our store. Professionally designed by the same guy (me) who designed the BBC weather graphics.

You can also download a FREE wind arrows and icons pack to complement the icon sets.

Watch out for special offers and discount codes. Currently there’s a special 40% discount on the full set of 3 icon sets (coloured backgrounds, transparent PNGs, and animated GIFs).

A quick reminder about today’s episode of Little Howard’s Big Question (4.30 BBC One). It’s called ‘Where is Big Howard?’ and features a guest appearance from Lady Gaga. And a massive pork pie. It’s also got some bloke who claims to be Big Howard but clearly isn’t.

Confused? You might be. Just as confused as I was when trying to composite a cartoon boy behind a glass screen with writing on it which had to be replaced by some different writing and then have a woman wearing a lobster on her head wander around in front of it.

Anyway, to find out what the gibbing flump is going on you’ll just have to watch BBC One at 4.30 this afternoon.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of customary sneak peeks…

…read more

Here’s a little test of Newton – the physics engine for After Effects (almost a snip at €179 from motionboutique.com).

I wondered how easy it would be to build a quick pinball simulation – so I threw together some pretty crude shapes in Illustrator, pasted them on to an After Effects layer and let Newton do the rest. It automatically splits each mask on to individual layers (if you choose to) and allows you to set all kinds of properties for each object (friction, bounce, angular and linear damping etc).

I did cheat the flippers a bit, which in the original project were just flapping about like crazy using wiggle expressions. Tweaking them for the few collisions is the only post-Newton fiddling that’s gone on. Oh, apart from tilting the whole thing in 3D and putting auto-orient towards camera on the ball. The important thing here is that the motion of the ball is entirely automatic and probably next to impossible (or at least mind-numbingly tedious) using traditional keyframing.

Anyway, here’s the result.
watch video…

Here’s a special add-on pack for our TV-style Weather Icon Sets – containing a new wind icon and a few different sets of wind arrows in 8 directions.

The icons come in various formats – PNGs with solid coloured backgrounds, PNGs with transparency, and animating GIFs – making them completely compatible with our current icon sets 1, 2, and 3.

The addition of a ‘WINDY’ cloud symbol will help to make the sets more compatible with the likes of Yahoo! Weather and Google Weather too.

The Wind Pack is free to download from the store.

Latest icon set available now from the store. The perfect accompaniment for hand-drawn fonts like ‘Pointy’, ‘Handvetica’, ‘Grutch Shaded’, ‘Sketch Block’ etc – these hand-sketched weather icons come in 4 different sizes, in coloured and outline versions, all in PNG format with transparency. Included as a free bonus is Weather Sketched Regular – a Truetype font containing all 32 icons – lowercase gives you the weather symbols, and the first 8 uppercase characters give you the eight directional wind arrows.

This set now includes text icons for ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’ plus a new pictorial icon for ‘windy’ – so they can now easily be used in conjunction with the Yahoo! Weather API, and similar weather data providers.
…read more

I have just put the finishes touches on my latest attempt at a Local Weather Widget for Wordpress, this time branded in Leitrim colours.

I first had a stab at this kind of thing a couple of years ago but removed it when it broke the blog completely…! This new version seems a bit more stable, but still suffers from missing data from the Yahoo! Weather feed, especially overnight. Also, and here’s the problem, it’s still hard coded into a text widget, which isn’t exactly ideal. You should be able to see the real thing at the bottom of the sidebar on the right… (UPDATE : I’ve just turned the weather widget off – it should be back once I’ve worked out how to make it not quite so easy to download a free set of my weather icons..!)

So if there are any bored PHP / Wordpress experts out there who’d be interested in a collaboration, please do get in touch. It’d be nice to make this into a proper Irish Local Weather widget downloadable from wordpress.org/extend, with options in the admin page to select your county branding, your town or city (or long-lat?), and choose from current, 1 day or 2 day forecasts or combinations.

As before, the XML parsing and CSS classes are based on those by Marco Voegeli. The data is currently coming from Yahoo!Weather, but I’m in the process of investigating the free weather API from World Weather Online – they offer a longer-range forecast, and they’re also using my weather icons!

Here’s a sneak peek at a brand new set of ‘realistic’ weather icons’ ideal for websites or apps.

A complete set of 40 different weather types (including night-time versions) each framed inside a recessed window that also reflects the type of weather ‘outside’ by way of various lighting effects ‘inside’. The weather views themselves are opaque, but the surrounding border has varying levels of PNG transparency – basically it means that these icons will work beautifully no matter what colour background they are placed on.

I’ve called this set ‘Window on the Weather’ – and like the traditional weather symbols sets, it’s royalty free for personal and commercial use.

By the way, if you’re looking for a free Weather API so you can build your own weather application, you could try World Weather Online, who supply worldwide weather and XML/JSON/CSV weather data feed via. their Weather API. They are also, incidentally, currently using my ‘TV-style’ weather symbols on their site right now!

To learn more about the ‘Window on the Weather’ Icon Set – click the image below…