Selling the Weather
App Store Campaigns for a 300M+ User Base.
Company
AccuWeather
Role
Art Director
Led App Store visual direction. Designed the campaign graphics and directed the team on production and localization. Worked with a motion designer on app preview videos. Built the A/B testing program with the UX team. Collaborated with senior product designers on the Premium+ landing page and upsell system.
Campaign Direction
A/B Testing
Localization
Conversion Design
Onboarding
AccuWeather's app reaches 1.5 billion devices across iOS and Android. I led visual direction for both stores for 2.5 years. Four seasonal campaigns a year, adapted across platforms, localized into eight languages, and A/B tested. The work extended through the full Premium+ subscription funnel.
Seasonal Campaigns
Each campaign was a distinct visual world built on a consistent structural grammar. The 2021 campaigns used a dark, cinematic treatment: rainy-night backgrounds, the app UI floating at an angle. Serious, but never alarming. Later campaigns shifted tone entirely, with season-specific palettes that let viewers feel the time of year without reading a word. I designed the graphic elements for each campaign; my team and I produced and localized the assets together. Our copywriter shaped the headlines.
A/B Testing
The testing program came together with the UX team and our copywriter. It started with the most fundamental question: flat color or photography? From there it moved into headline variants and feature ordering. I directed all test variant designs; I set up the testing program with UX. I designed every variant, UX ran the tests and tracked conversions, and the copywriter wrote the headlines. Across these campaigns, app downloads increased 2–3% on a 300M+ user base.
Localization
Every campaign shipped in eight languages. Our project manager coordinated external translators. Once the copy reached my team, our junior and senior designers manually adapted each asset, ensuring text sizes, line breaks, and layout for different character counts and reading patterns were localized for every language. We treated each language version as its own design problem, not a find-and-replace.
Premium+ Landing Page
The Premium+ landing page was a genuine design collaboration: a senior designer, a senior product designer, and I each brought initial directions and synthesized them into the final system. Product wrote the brief. The page drove conversions from App Store ad placements, with seasonal visuals matched to the current campaign, feature callouts, and a direct path to checkout. The visual language we established here carried straight into the in-app upsell carousel.
Premium+ Upsell Carousel
The in-app carousel extended the landing page system into the purchase flow without friction. Six feature screens: Ad-Free, Alerts, Hourly Graphs, Widgets, Persistent Notifications, and Health & Activities. Each used a consistent structure against a dark teal-to-deep-blue gradient and led to a pricing screen.
Onboarding
The onboarding flow sat at the other end of the funnel: the first experience after downloading, before a user had any reason to pay. We reframed every permission request as a user benefit, with full-bleed atmospheric photography holding the brand's cinematic register from the welcome screen through the final notification ask. The same visual system, consistent from first impression to conversion, across iOS and Android.
Challenge
AccuWeather's App Store presence had no seasonal cadence and no testing program. Weather is one of the most crowded categories in the store, and visual direction directly affects installs and Premium+ conversion.
Solution
Treat the App Store as a living campaign asset: seasonal, tested, and emotionally resonant. Design the full Premium+ funnel, from App Store discovery through paid subscription, as a single connected experience.