Simple Weather icons for Visual Crossing or similar APIs

by Alexander Thomas (aka Dr. Lex)
version 4

Weather icons preview

What is it?

I'll be very short about this one: this is a simple free-to-use set for the 22 possible icons that match the ‘icon’ description used in the Visual Crossing weather API. The icon names are:

This is more than their documentation currently lists for the ‘icons2’ set, but these names match the ones they also provide in their own sets of icons. I'm not sure if their documentation is outdated, or they simply provide more icons to make them compatible with other APIs. It was less effort for me to simply create the additional icons than to figure out whether this was actually necessary.

Download

Download the icons (ZIP archive)

The download contains the icons in SVG format. You can convert them to other formats if you wish, but using SVG is recommended when possible.

You may be wondering, why are the icons packaged in a zip instead of being simply embedded as-is into this webpage? Simple: I wouldn't want anyone to hotlink the icons from this very website into their own app. Conversely, nobody would want to make the reliability of their app depend on an external website that can go down or rearrange its files at any moment.

The older versions are still available:

License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

In practice this means you can do pretty much anything with these icons. The only restriction is that as long as the originals are remotely recognisable, either because you are using them as-is or because you modified them not too dramatically, then you must visibly mention my name somewhere in your product where users can see it. You can either use “Dr. Lex” or “Alexander Thomas”. You can link to my website if you wish, but you don't have to. There is no need to contact me if you provide the required attribution, and there is no requirement to share profits. If you really insist, you can donate something.

History

In April 2016, I needed a set of icons for creating a quick and simple weather webapp that relied on the Dark Sky forecast API. Given that the API only had 10 possible weather state icons, I thought it would be trivial to find a set of plain, non-animated usable icons with no strings attached. Either I was wrong, or search engines nowadays are getting increasingly useless due to excessive fuzziness and attempts to be smart even when users enter the most idiotic search queries. I spent dozens of minutes sifting through a lot of junk, noticing that some persons seem to have done a great effort to boost search engine rankings of their commercially-licensed icon sets, obscuring the possibly free sets I was looking for.

Being not a total n00b when it comes to drawing stuff, I figured that it was more efficient to simply draw my own icons from scratch, than to keep fighting the search engines. So I did. It took me less than an hour to draw the 10 icons. They may not be designed according to whatever trendy designer school rules or semi-fascist design rules imposed by some big name company that are currently in vogue, but they are functional.

In April 2020, Apple bought Dark Sky (a.k.a. Forecast.io), and they announced the free API would be shut down at the end of 2022. I started looking for an alternative, and I found Visual Crossing. They have a similar API with similar pricing options (i.e. for my needs it's just for free). Although my old set of icons was compatible with their ‘icons1’ set, it was only a small effort to extend it to match their ‘icons2’ set, and so I did. Visual Crossing does offer their own free sets of icons, but I prefer my own.