All of my Weather Icon Packs are now available to buy at the World Weather Online Developer site.

World Weather Online have recently launched their new Developer Portal and have moved all their API management and execution on to the Mashery developer platform.

Better still, they have have very kindly listed all of the Icon Packs from my store on their own site. This includes the brand new Symbol Set 12 which is based closely on their own icon set and comes bundled with a special extended 96 icon version.

I recently completed a set of Moon Phase icons to match my classic TV-Style Weather Symbols for a site that’s launching soon.

I’ve also put the whole set of Moon Icons available for sale in my store. Each set comes in 3 sizes 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256 pixels. PNG format with 3 different backgrounds (including transparent).

You get the standard icons for New Moon, Waxing Crescent, 1st Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, Waning Gibbous, 3rd (Last) Quarter, Waning Crescent plus the additional THREE icons between each.
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I’m always interested to see how my weather symbols are being used, so I was delighted to get these cool photos from Kati at boysandgirlsshop.com featuring some familiar looking weather icons and some cute children wearing cool organic kids clothes.

I like the fact that they use (quote) “just normal kids (not models) for their marketing images to allow their individual personalities to shine through”.

Designed for Urban Living and Created with Care, Boys&Girls is a bright and brilliant combination of stylish, practical and affordable kids clothes made from fairly traded and organic cotton.

Launched in March 2011, the Boys&Girls team wanted to create a kidswear brand that was ethical, cool and accessible. Each garment is created with care using GOTS certified organic cotton and organic dying processes for extra feel-good factor and with a view to reducing the impact of manufacturing on the environment and the people that come into contact with the cotton all the way through the supply chain – not just the consumer.

Here are a few more images, but you can see more over at www.boysandgirlsshop.com
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Here’s the latest addition to our royalty free weather symbol sets.

This time it’s a complete set of weather icons in a single colour – black versions for light backgrounds and white versions for dark backgrounds.

This pack includes 42 icons as transparent PNGs – one set black, one set white, each at 2 sizes (64×64 and 512×512 pixels).

The set also includes vector artwork in Illustrator (CS5) and EPS8 formats.

A special bonus Photoshop file has every single symbol in a separate layer as a Vector Smart Object, so it’s easy enough to resize the entire set to any resolution you like. I’ve opened the Photoshop file in CS3 to CS6 and it works fine – probably earlier versions too.

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I’ve had enough people now (mainly teachers and schools) asking about printable versions of our TV-style weather symbols that I thought it was about time I made some printable vector versions available for download.

So here is the ‘School Pack’ – designed for anyone who wants simply to print out some weather symbols for kids, or perhaps use them as illustrations for children’s weather worksheets. I figured that a set of symbols as individual PDF files might be the most versatile and useful – they can be scaled up and printed poster-size if you want, or easily embedded as illustrations in other documents. …read more

I recently came across an article (albeit from last year I think) by Takamasa Matsumoto concerning the Apple ‘iCloud’ icon and the Golden Ratio. He explains that the basic shape of the cloud icon is based on four circles and both pairs of diameters are in the ratio 1:1.6. The ratio of height to length of the whole cloud shape is also 1.6 – which is ‘close to’ the Golden Ratio.

I’m someone with more than a passing interest in cloud icons, so this got me wondering…

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It’s always nice to see my BBC weather graphics getting an outing with a new presenter.

Yes, somewhat bizarrely, that’s Prince Charles weather presenter extraordinaire during a visit to the BBC in Scotland yesterday.

Seems he did a pretty good job – you can judge his efforts for yourself over here on the BBC site. By all accounts it’s also causing quite a stir on YouTube.
 

Just a quick note to say that a brand new set of weather icons (transparent PNGs AND vector artwork) is available to download from the store. As always, these weather symbols are royalty free for personal and commercial use.

 
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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!

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.

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).

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.