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Mike Afford Media BLOG

Latest news, observations, and the occasional comment

Pebble weather watch face

I’m always interested to see my weather icons being used for applications out there in the real world, so I was pleased when Jon Barlow (@orviwan) got in touch about his weather watch face for the Pebble smartwatch.

Pebble famously raised $4.7 million on Kickstarter with 30 days left to go, eventually becoming one of the most highly crowdfunded projects to date.

The smartwatch can communicate with Android and iOS devices via Bluetooth and there is a growing community of developers producing custom apps and alternative watch faces.

Jon’s Chunk-Weather face uses Yahoo weather data and a special one-bit conversion of selected icons from one of my single colour weather icon sets. I have been adding various mapping tables over the past couple of weeks and hope to be adding a Yahoo version soon so that anyone can use my icons with Yahoo weather data just like Jon has with his Pebble weather face.

Full source for Chunk-Weather is available on GitHub with a related forum post here. Some of the images on the forum feature an earlier version of the watch face using the ubiquitous Climacons (or Meteocons, I forget which), but the latest version uses my icons.

The complete (original high resolution) set of single colour weather icons (in PNG and vector format) can be downloaded from my store.

UPDATE (February 2019):

Looks like Pebble went under.

Wikipedia says “On December 7, 2016, Pebble officially announced that the company would be shut down and would no longer manufacture or continue support for any devices, nor honor any existing warranties”

Shame.

I’ve updated some of my weather icons to include vector versions as well as the regular PNG images. These new sets now include an SVG file for every weather condition (as many as 92 in some cases). Check out the image below showing one of the sets which has been updated with SVG weather icons.

I had previously bundled some sets with either Adobe Illustrator files, or occasionally Photoshop documents with ‘smart vector object’ layers, but the advantage of the SVG format is that it’s supported (to some extent at least ) by all major web browsers – I’ve tested embedded SVG markup and it seems to work beautifully in Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. read more »

Just a reminder that I’ve recently updated a number of my weather sets to include loads of new icons which now makes them compatible with a much wider range of data suppliers. So, for example, both sets of my classic ‘TV-style’ icons (originally designed as a royalty free alternative to the classic BBC weather symbols) have been updated to 92 icons apiece. read more »

Recently completed a series of videos for Waitrose TV featuring some ideas for side dishes to accompany their ‘Menu From Waitrose’ range of ready meals. The idea for the videos is that while the main dish is cooking in the oven or microwave, you have time to prepare the perfect side dish with simple ingredients to make the dish your own.

The videos were produced by Stepping Stone Media with editing, grading and graphics from the Mike Afford Media Village.
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Following on from our Waitrose TV Christmas graphics I’ve recently completed a little Easter sting for Waitrose TV produced by our good friends at Stepping Stone Media.

Waitrose TV Easter

The graphics were once again created from some live action footage with graphical elements added from the current Waitrose Easter branding. Built from two SD frames – a wide shot and close-up of flowers – stuck together in faux-3D in After Effects with some depth-mapped defocussing, lighting effects and camera wobble added.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, below.
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Weather Icon Packs

All of my Weather Icon Packs are now available to buy at the World Weather Online Developer site as well as here on my own Weather Icon page.

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 WW-01 Weather Icon Set which is based closely on their own symbol set and now includes four sizes of every icon, and a special bonus set filenamed according to the original WWO condition codes to allow for easy implementation without remapping.

Classic Lunar Phase Icons

32 symbols per lunar cycle
PNG format. 3 sizes x3 backgrounds (including transparent)

Price : €5
Add to cart

I recently completed a set of Moon Phase icons to match my popular 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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Recently completed some graphics for Waitrose TV.

Waitrose TV Live was the first ever live streamed online show for Waitrose and was produced by our good friends over at Stepping Stone Media. The show came live from the Waitrose Cookery School in north London and could be watched live via Waitrose TV and Facebook.

Waitrose TV Live

The graphics were created from some HD footage specially shot at the Cookery School using Christmas trees that had been decorated in line with Waitrose Xmas branding. I created a single super high-res environment that I could pan around in After Effects and added some extra twinkling lights in the background using particles in 3D space.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, and a trail, below.
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Last night saw the first outing of my latest virtual set for Setanta Sports. It’s once again based on the ‘white’ set I built for the Premier league and GAA programmes, but tweaked slightly to accommodate Setanta’s swanky new desk.
As usual it is rendered in real-time with full camera tracking thanks to the awesome power of RT Software’s tOG 3D system.

UEFA Champions League Studio

I’m always interested to see how my weather icons 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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Mike Afford Media

Mike Afford Media BLOG

Pebble Watch – Weather Face

UPDATE (February 2019):

SVG weather icons

Rainy weather icons

‘Menu From Waitrose’ video series

Easter sting for Waitrose TV

Weather Icons for World Weather Online

Moon Phase Symbols

Christmas graphics for Waitrose TV

Champions League Virtual Studio Set

Weather Symbols for Boys and Girls