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

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

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).

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

It’s taken a little while, but I’ve just finished giving a little facelift to the Angelfield website. Last night I did a quick Wordpress install, customised to serve as a simple comments page in case any visitors wanted to leave a message.

I’d already changed the look of the main site, making it more of a tribute to Brian, who died tragically last September. He was the singer in the band, a fine musician and lyricist, and my best friend.

We formed Angelfield some time in the late eighties, although we’d been playing music together for many years before that.

As well as music, anyone that knew Brian would know also of his love of horses and racing. With that in mind, his family and friends have sponsored a race in his memory.

The Brian Spencer Memorial Chase is taking place at Plumpton on the 9th of May as part of Family Raceday 2010.

According to the Plumpton Racecourse site the Family Raceday is “an action packed programme of family entertainments … with Free Entry for children under 16″.

So if you’d like to have a child-friendly fun day out, remembering Brian and the good times, in the company of old friends (and horses), then get down to Plumpton on the 9th May. I think there are coaches being organised too, I’ll update this post when I find out more about that.

I expect the odd bit of promotional email to arrive every now and again. But recently I’ve noticed a marked increase in emails offering web services and/or SEO, always from India, and always sent to at least four separate email addresses at this domain (contact@, support@, services@, ceo@, products@, among others – none of which even exist). Come on guys, please don’t make me set up a spam filter to look for the word ‘India’.

Here’s a quick website design I recently completed for a holiday apartment in Cannes. The client was looking for a refresh of their existing site, so I designed a quick-loading page template with a sunny feel and moved over all the existing content to the new design with a few on-site search engine optimizations thrown in. Everything up and running in under 48 hours.

If you view the site in Internet Explorer you’ll see that all the boxes (including the heading banner image) have square corners, but if you use a proper browser like Firefox, you should see rounded corners. I know it’s a bit of a cop out, and I did (briefly) investigate JQuery rounded corners, but in the end I opted for a IE conditional comment to replace the heading strap with an alternate (square cornered) image so that at least the look and feel is consistent depending on which browser the site is viewed in.

I’m also now a big fan of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. While I was doing a quick check for cross-browser compatibility I was able to run Firefox and Safari and Explorer versions 6, 7 & 8 all at the same time on my laptop. Possibly the subject of a future blog post I think…

I’ve recently been experimenting with Cufón text replacement, and decided to put it to use on a site I’ve been messing about with. I’d also been converting the whole thing to a Wordpress-powered site (more on that later), so it seemed to make sense to look for a plug-in to do the job.

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

…read more

Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. (UPDATE: currently disabled). It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

…read more

I’ve had plenty of people visiting my site looking for weather symbols to download so I thought it was about time that I actually made some weather symbols of my own.

The problem has been that everyone has been trying to get their hands on the old BBC ones which I ‘refreshed’ slightly as part of the 2005 BBC Weather relaunch. Obviously those symbols are owned by the Beeb, but I’ve been directing people back to the Weather Centre anyway, in the sure knowledge that they won’t be allowed to use them for copyright reasons. One visitor also reported back that they were refused permission because it also might be perceived as a ‘degree of endorsement by the BBC’.

Which is entirely fair enough.

So I decided to design a set of 40 new and unique weather symbols / icons that have a kind of ‘homage to old school TV graphics’ quality to them, but which have been designed entirely from scratch and obviously haven’t taken a single point, line or vector from the originals.

…read more

I’ve just completed a little 50 second web commercial for textatrack.co.uk – it’s been put together entirely from scratch with After Effects, using 3D animations and Photoshop layers. The 3D phone and laptop models were bought in separately and modified by me using Cinema 4D. …read more

A quick redesign for the local website for Blackheath – a lovely little village in Surrey.

Visit the site at www.blackheathsurrey.co.uk

If you have a website of your own – maybe one that was built years ago and in need of a quick ‘refresh’ – please do get in touch. We can copy your existing content over to a fresh new design in no time at all.

As well as a cleaner look, your new site will be optimised for faster loading and better search engine placement. So if your site is looking a bit tired and worn out, contact us for a bit of ‘website spring cleaning’.

Has anyone else spent ages staring at a spinning ‘LOADING’ image? Watching the little guy spining away – then realising the connection has hung and the upload (or download) stopped hours ago. It’s amazing how a little bit of movement can imply all sorts of activity, which may (or may not) actually be happening.