2019 | Yahoo
Intro
Gloomy morning. Rainy day. A glance at the phone to answer what's the weather this evening? Weather forecasting is one of the most important breakthroughs for humans. Where science meets technology to help us make better decisions in our daily life. In 2019, Yahoo reached out to redesign their weather icon set. I led the icon's creative direction, explored many icon design variations, and defined the icon principles and guidelines.
Yahoo needed a new set of weather icons because the previous icon set was too generic, not glanceable, and too complicated. They looked like this:
We collaboratively collected the definition for each weather name. For example, light rain is when the rain rate is from above 0mm to 2.5mm per hour (puddles form slowly). This information being used to inform the style and shape of the icons.
I sketched the first draft to get the initial ideas down and had an early discussion with the team. Here's a snippet of the early sketches:
