Weatherwise

Design

When I was a part of Local Wisdom, I was first introduced to their prized internal app, Weatherwise, a free iOS and Android weather app that dynamically illustrates various weather states based on complex, real-time data. During design, I was responsible for the UI, illustrating, animating, and testing themes for Weatherwise. This included hand painting landscapes and creations in Photoshop, retouching photography, and then animating the imagery using Local Wisdom’s custom theme building software.

For greater accessibility, the custom software for Weatherwise themes adopts a lot of the graphical and interactive trends from existing animation and image editing apps. However, the adjustment of artists’ themes according to temperature, wind speed, rain, time, and other effects from Weather Underground make it exceptionally unique. Creators can drag-and-drop their own artwork, or use templates and advanced effects already provided - with no coding required.

I was involved with the user experience, testing and creative feedback of Local Wisdom’s theme builder, from when it existed as a number of various program windows for its web-interface to a full-fledged functioning app. Because we were working with familiar and new practices when it comes to image creation and animation software, it was essential that we keep our UI elements recognizable and informative.

I think the unique part of working on Weatherwise was the custom theme builder used by artists to animate their themes for the app. A lot of us were artists, so to start we essentially designed this tool for ourselves. It was a desktop app that contained multiple windows – one for the viewport of your illustration and assigning an illustration to the time of day and a weather condition, and another for the animation and weather effect properties. It was a mess. So we looked at tools we were already using, programs like Photoshop and After Effects that had sort of set the standard for image editing and keyframe animation, as well as the 2D game engine (Cocos 2D) in which Weatherwise was being built in. The result was an independent app that was used to create Weatherwise themes, but we dreamed of leveraging the app for other products as well – artists looking to create sprites or even designers trying to demo a short web experience.