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Wunderground Launches Major Site Redesign and New Logo

By: Dr. Jeff Masters, 12:13 PM GMT on April 15, 2014

Back when I helped found the world's first commercial on-line weather service--The Weather Underground--back in 1995, we adopted a simple and colorful rainbow logo that expressed our mission well: a website dedicated to unlocking and sharing vast amounts of weather data with as many people as possible using the latest digital technologies, in a way that is visually appealing and engaging. Nineteen years later, we are transitioning to a completely new logo, as part of a site-wide redesign aimed at furthering that mission. We kept the colors and vibrancy of the rainbow but replaced the rainbow shape with the letters "WU"; a raindrop over the "U" represents rain falling into a rain gauge, a nod to our incredible Personal Weather Station (PWS) community (34,000 strong!) As our users have moved from desktop computers to mobile devices, we've had to adapt our user interface designs to cope with the increasing levels of data we've collected being presented on decreasing screen sizes. The layout and features of our site are now available and usable across all devices. We've worked with our users to organize our site in a more intuitive way, so you can access the information you want quicker and easier. We've updated our type to a more legible typeface, and changed our core color palette with the user in mind. Not only does the new color palette better convey information consistently across our products, it also works better for the color blind. We've added a new PWS dashboard, which lets you see rapid fire data from any personal weather station. 


Figure 1. As we slowly rolled out the features of the new web site over the past two weeks, our logo has gone through the transformations seen here.

If you have specific criticism, praise, or bug reports to pass on about the new site, go to our New Site Design Feedback page, fill out the form at the bottom of any city forecast page, or submit an email to support@wunderground.com. To learn more about the site re-design, and to see a timeline of the history of Weather Underground, see our new site redesign page. For those of you are are still fans of our original design, we will continue to support our original "classic" web site at http://classic .wunderground.com. Thanks for participating in the wunderground community!

Jeff Masters

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The views of the author are his/her own and do not necessarily represent the position of The Weather Company or its parent, IBM.