設計回顧:誰發明了天氣預報符號

As a design student at the Norwich School of Art in the early 1970s, Mark Allen watched the weather broadcast every afternoon on the BBC. Back then, TV presenters slid magnetic symbols around a metal map: dots for rain, asterisks for snow, lines to mark off areas of equal pressure. "They were just hieroglyphics as far as everybody was concerned," Allen says. "Why was a triangle a rain shower?"

20世紀70年代初，在諾維奇藝術學院唸書的馬克·艾倫(Mark Allen)每天下午都會看英國廣播公司(BBC)的天氣預報。當時電視主持人在金屬地圖上擺弄帶吸鐵石的符號：點狀物代表下雨，星號代表下雪，用線條標記大氣壓同等的地區。“人們會覺得這些符號不好懂。”

For his final project in 1974, Allen set out to make weather icons More intuitive. He looked to a set of pictograms by Otl Aicher, who devised spare, thick-lined figures for the 1972 Olympic Games. Allen used a similar style to trace a puffy cloud, adding simple icons to the bottom edge: rain droplets, lightning bolts, rays of sun. "The main vehicle was the cloud, and I hung everything off that," he says. The BBC adopted Allen's iconography in 1975, in exchange for 200 pounds and a small percentage of license fees. His drawings stayed on the air for 30 years.

1974年，艾倫的畢業設計令天氣符號顯得更加直觀。他參考了奧托·艾舍(Otl Aicher)的一套小圖標——艾舍爲1972年奧運會設計了一系列簡單、粗線條的人物標記。最後，艾倫使用類似風格畫出一塊蓬鬆的雲朵，在底部補充了一些簡單的符號：雨滴、閃電、陽光。“最主要的載體是雲朵，然後把其他東西附在上面，”他說。1975年，BBC以200鎊和極小的分成比例買下了艾倫這套符號的使用權。他所繪製的符號在電視上出現了30年。

They were neither the first nor the last weather icons, but they were perhaps the most elegant. For decades, weather maps had been cluttered with technical notation. The first commercial weather map, sent out by the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1910, represented cloud conditions with empty and filled circles and the wind with tiny arrows. By 1912, these maps were reproduced in more than 100 cities. The symbols grew less obscure, says Mark Monmonier, a historian and geographer at Syracuse University, when competition among wire services, which started sending out weather maps in the '30s, led to simpler, more attractive designs.

它們並不是第一組天氣符號，也不是最後一組，但它們或許是最簡潔優美的一組。幾十年來，氣象地圖上亂糟糟地堆滿各種技術符號。1910年，美國氣象局發行了第一份商業氣象地圖，用空心和實心的圓圈來代表雲層分佈狀況，用小箭頭來代表風。1912年，這些地圖在100多個城市再版。20世紀30年代，各大通訊社之間展開競爭，雪城大學的歷史學家兼地理學家馬克·蒙莫尼爾(Mark Monmonier)說，它們紛紛刊登氣象圖，因此所用的符號不再那麼含糊，開始使用更簡單、更有吸引力的圖標設計。

Weathermen often drew their maps as cameras rolled, using wax pencils or felt-tip markers, until the 1970s, when, as Allen's weather icons were adopted at the BBC, U.S. stations tried their own stick-on, magnetic symbols. The advent of computer graphics in the 1980s brought more standardized, low-res icons: "You only had 16 colors that you could put on the graphic," says Mike Nelson, a Denver meteorologist who worked for a company called ColorGraphics Weather Systems. "You couldn't be all that creative."

面對鏡頭，天氣播報員經常用蠟筆或記號筆在氣象圖上勾畫，20世紀70年代，艾倫的天氣符號被BBC採用的同時，美國電視臺也開始使用它們自己的磁鐵天氣符號。20世紀80年代，電腦製圖的出現帶來了更多標準化的、低解析度的天氣符號：“只有16種色彩可以上色，”丹佛的氣象學家，在“彩圖氣象系統”公司工作的麥克·尼爾森(Mike Nelson)說，“所以沒法太有創意。”

By the late 1980s, computer systems were advanced enough that stations could select their own custom-made graphics. And when weather forecasts made their way to websites and mobile apps, things became even more customized. Around 2000, a government meteorologist in Texas named Dennis Cain made a set of icons from photographs — rainy streets, wind turbines, headlights in the fog — which became the standard images on .

到20世紀80年代末，電腦系統有了長足的進步，電視臺可以選擇自行定製的天氣符號。當天氣預報出現在網絡和移動應用上之後，這些符號就更加個性化了。2000年前後，得克薩斯州一個名叫丹尼斯·凱恩(Dennis Cain)的政府氣象學家用照片做了一套符號——下雨的街道、旋風、大霧中的汽車燈光——它們成了網站的標準符號。

Like other weather icons, Cain's have fierce adherents. When the National Weather Service said it might swap the photo icons for more conventional figures, it received 18,000 comments in the first few days — most angry. The BBC faced similar outrage when it retired Allen's icons in 2005. Weather symbols "can get very controversial very quickly," says Robert Bunge, who was the director of Internet services for the National Weather Service at the time. "You can get buried in it."

和其他天氣符號一樣，凱恩的符號也有不少擁躉。當國家氣象服務中心聲稱可能會用更傳統的符號換掉這套照片符號後，一天內就收到18000個評論，大多數都對此表示憤怒。2005年，BBC換掉艾倫那套符號時也面臨了同樣的憤怒。天氣符號“會迅速引發爭議”，國家氣象服務中心當時的主管羅伯特·邦格(Robert Bunge)說，“爭議激烈到能把你埋起來。”