EMPOWERING AFRICANS THROUGH THEIR OWN LANGUAGES
Bhala (meaning ‘write’ in Ndebele, Zulu and Xhosa) is the first intelligent African language keyboard and stickers app designed for Africans and African Languages! The app helps tens of thousands of users each day write quicker, faster and more accurately by learning their writing style. Bhala also works as a spell-checker and offers predictive text by auto-complete and word prediction. Bhala is the first app to offer Ndebele, Shona, Swati, Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu spell-checkers online, and the use of advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing) makes Bhala far superior than existing local spell-checkers.
When it came to rebranding it we looked at ancient Ndebele symbols and one in particular that represents ‘conversation’. Since the app currently supports: chiShona, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZulu, kiSwahili, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana and SiSwati one is able to have the same conversation as you would have face-to-face with a familiar face. This face-to-face interaction is what laid the grounds to create our design. The result? A logo that represents the ideology of a face-to-face interaction while borrowing from the past.
