WEkEO Website Redesign

WEkEO is an EU-funded initiative that gives researchers, developers and public institutions free access to Copernicus Earth Observation data — everything from atmospheric conditions and ocean temperatures to land use and climate change indicators. Beyond a mere data repository, it's a full environment for exploring, visualising and processing satellite imagery at scale. As such, therein lies a deeper challenge: making sure that a platform of this complexity is actually usable. That the right people can find what they need, understand what's available and what isn't, and navigate an ecosystem of tools — from data viewers and catalogues to Jupyter notebooks environments — without getting lost. The key idea was to put user experience as the center of it all, because it’s what determines whether the data gets used at all.

We worked on this project alongside Lobelia who led the development. Our role was the conceptualisation and design of the platform — turning a set of usability problems into a cohesive visual and interaction strategy. Our key goal was to redesign WEkEO's website to improve usability, clarify the full range of products and services on offer, and update the UI to a more contemporary look and feel, all while respecting the Copernicus brand identity, giving visibility to the EU and Copernicus logos, and ensuring the redesign felt like a natural evolution of WEkEO's existing identity. In short, we needed to move from a more outdated user interface to a renewed, contemporary one that transmitted professionalism, made the experience intuitive and user-friendly, and overall visually increased awareness and understanding of what WEkEO actually offers.

Every one of those goals — making the offer clearer, the data easier to navigate, the platform more professional — was achieved through very specific graphic and visual design choices. It's a reminder that usability doesn't live in one department - it exists in the typography, the whitespaces, the colour of a button, the weight of a heading. Decisions that might seem purely aesthetic on first glance are, in fact, functional.

As such, we grounded the redesign in a few key principles. Black and white would dominate backgrounds and typography so that the satellite imagery — which is at the very core of the WEkEO service — could stand out and take centre stage. The new colour palette introduced subtle variations while keeping the existing brand colours intact — a deliberate choice to ensure a smooth transition and visual continuity, reserving colour for where it would matter most: buttons, calls to action, icons, and highlighted text.

Geometric shapes, particularly rectangles and circles, would anchor the visual language in the realm of Earth Observation. The overall aesthetic would lean towards minimalism and professionalism, edging closer to a scientific presentation than a marketing page. And the design system needed to be versatile enough to work across high-impact, persuasive screens, dense information layouts, and functional UI elements alike.

On typography, we identified a clear tension: WEkEO was using Titillium Web as its primary font, a Google Font that appears on over 800,000 websites. While functional, it contributed to a generic feel and lacked the distinctiveness needed for a platform undergoing an identity redesign. We proposed Studio Feixen Sans VF as a replacement - a sans-serif typeface designed specifically for digital interfaces, with excellent readability at small sizes and rounded forms that echo the circular motifs throughout the site. It also offered robust multi-language support, essential for an EU-backed platform.

We also ran user-testing sessions with 10 real users — a way to validate how our UX and content choices worked in tandem with usability and navigability. The idea behind the design was modular: sections and components could be re-purposed across the site, creating consistency without rigidity.

This entire process highlights an interesting part of design work: thinking about how a certain user experience and feeling can be achieved through a series of deliberate visual choices, decisions that are everything but arbitrary. Every decision in this project had a rationale, from the weight of a typeface to the shape of an icon, also adding transitions and animations that brought a more “kinetic”, dynamic aspect to the website. And that's ultimately what anchored the redesign work: the understanding that in a platform and data environment this complex, design isn't decoration, but the backbone of the interaction between the data and the people who use it.