Weather Underground App Concept
rational.design
Weather Underground is The Weather Company’s fan-favorite weather app, powered by a network of more than 250,000 personal weather stations rather than airport sensors alone.
The challenge: Over coffee, The Weather Company’s CEO challenged me to reimagine this legacy app. One week later, we had a working redesign.
My role: Creative director. With a development partner from my consultancy days, I ran the project on an agentic setup built on Claude, a small AI-powered agency covering research, strategy, UX, design and development.
Key decisions
- Celebrate the station owners. The app’s data comes from volunteers with a strong community and early-internet roots, so the design puts them and their stations front and center.
- A nod to that legacy. Retro-inspired pixel graphics and a warm cream background, easier on the eyes than stark white, written for the people who built this network.
- Type for data and people. Rubik feels technical but human, with enough weights to keep dense weather data readable.
Result: From coffee to a working prototype on Vercel in one week - landed me my role as Creative Director at The Weather Company.
