Webflow Enterprise Partner
The Weather Company provides weather data to brands around the world. We helped them create a set of Branded Photo Themes for their partnership with Samsung. Download For Android Here.
We believe that nature’s everyday form of expression — weather — has more than a little something in common with art. So when The Weather Channel came to us with a neat chance to do something different, we jumped at the opportunity to visually portray the weather on their popular app in a way that wasn’t just about pictures of clouds or sunny landscapes.
Brooks is used to creating outdoor murals and roadside art installations, so the weather often plays a part in his work, though usually only secondhand. This partnership is the first time he’d been tasked with creating art with weather as the subject matter.
As it turns out, atmospheric conditions gain a good bit of meaning when shown through his signature whimsical characters, and Samsung’s latest smartphone camera was the perfect tool to translate them to the screen. Images were photographed solely using the company’s devices.
Samsung users love details. Little customizations that make their phones uniquely theirs and the freedom to project the back-stories of their personalities, likes, and quirks onto a device that’s their constant companion. So, we figured each of the weather ideas portrayed shouldn’t just be about the images, but the stories behind them. Not just theme packs, but one-screen narratives. In the end, they came to life brilliantly, supported by additional information and media that lives alongside The Weather Channel app on their site.
Working within The Weather Channel Digital’s template and with the help of photographer Tim Lampe, we composed 40-some images representing 17 weather conditions from sun to snow, clouds to clear night skies. While every photo is undoubtedly adorable, they’re also all about the place where emotion intersects with atmospheric phenomena.
Kyle’s characters shiver and sway in the breeze, grin in the dark, and give the side-eye to smoke. We created a responsive site to promote the project and documented the process on video as an extra to Samsung and TWC aficionados. We’re also flattered that our collaboration and film was featured on Vice’s Creators Project and has been shared and commented on widely all around the web.
Making sure Kyle's characters were arranged prominently and expressed the right emotions while not upstaging the weather stats and other app elements was a bit of a balancing act. We solved it by first mapping and then manually storyboarding every shot variation, and then by sending our Design Director on most of the shoots. We called it oversight, but he'd probably have tagged along anyway — working with Kyle is incredibly fun.
Download The App from the Google Play store, and instead of the typical rainy landscape, you’ll see Brooks’ smiling raindrops hanging from soaked umbrellas. A partly cloudy day features his quizzical clouds sharing the screen with a beaming orange sun. And a clear evening sky glows even more magically with Kyle’s man in the moon gazing down from a moody sunset. It’s weather personified, in the way only BlackCatTips could dream it.