Hey Erik,
I just wanted to say thanks for your awesome icons. I used them on a Saturday project I did awhile ago (http://weather.basementserver.org/) and they looked great!
Awesome idea. The next step would be allowing choice of departure time and arrival time and showing weather loosely based on that. The prediction might be less reliable but then at least I could put in that I was leaving for somewhere at 7pm and see the nighttime temp plus rain/snow/etc.
Thanks for the feedback! That was actually one of the features I wanted to add, but I never got around to implementing it. I was planning on using the time estimates from Google's directions (in addition to the departure time), but parsing and correlating that information proved a little tricky and I ran out of time. A visible temperature indicator is also a nice touch. Maybe I'll get a chance to add that soon.
Since most people using weather icons will also be using APIs by Accuweather, WUnderground, and Open Weather Map, it's good to try to match actual reported conditions as much as possible:
Often designers create lots of different wind and extreme icons (Tornado, Meteor) which will never be used and not enough subtle-difference icons (Mostly Sunny, Partly Sunny, Intermittent Clouds) which are needed. When implemented, we end up using only a small portion of a collection and repeating many icons.
There are some additions going on to make CSS addon sheets that match the NOAA, yahoo, accuweather, etc etc. It's just a ton of work to even get this far, I have to take month long breaks to return to the real world.
The next big release will be integration with weather service API codes and other weather codes, and fixing some nuanced things like moon phases which are hard to conceive when you're in the depths of things.
As far as the nuanced subtle-differences, that's a hard one. When designing, a lot of the icons start to be so similar, or the same, they become multi use. Some user research I need to do is to see how many people would use "mostly sunny, partly sunny, slightly overcast" as 3 icons, or if 1 works. I am pretty restricted with the choice to use the single color, bold stroke icon style. Especially when they are meant to look good at 16-20px.
IMHO weather icons really need color. This will be even more necessary when you want to have more subtle variations in conditions. Color - or shades of gray - could even be an indicator to the cloud type. A dark cloud with yellowish lightning is going to convey thunderstorms much faster and with less visual processing than anything you can possibly do in a mono-color icon.
This all leads to the question: Why use a single color?
As a icon font, anything you want to do with it is via CSS. So they can be any color, have a shadow, etc, but unless someone wants to get clever, the icons have to be any single color.
I could make component pieces that have color CSS coded and stack, like a yellow sun on a white cloud that are positioned on top of one another, but that would be a massive undertaking I don't think I could commit to.
If you were to release this set as SVG, color would get a lot easier. It'd also open up the possibility of adding animation. For example: http://codepen.io/noahblon/details/lxukH
Very nice. However, the symbol for hurricane is wrong. There is actually a standard symbol for hurricane and it has a solid center. The symbol you're using for hurricane, with an open center, is actually the symbol for a tropical storm.
I followed Font Awesome 4.0 really, I am not really the biggest expert on CSS advanced features like wildcard selectors, but as someone else said, I think there's performance hits.
Not that I know of. I got a few requests via email and github issues for very specific conditions in the Scandinavian countries. Some are so sublte, I am not a great enough graphic artist to truly nail the metaphor of what "dust" looks like in the style I borrowed (with permission) from @artill. Fog, smog, haze, dust, "dangerous air quality" are so similar but abstract in the style chosen.
I wanted to make my own iOS7 style homepage for my phone, so I needed weather icons, And I found the original art from @artill, and then I didn't want to make PNGs so I thought an icon would be good, that was about a year ago. It's improved a lot since then and I lot of people are using it.
