Kenyan artists chosen to create African inspired stickers for Opera’s newly dedicated chat service
By Milliam Murigi, February 23, 2021
Two Kenyan artists, Brian Omolo and Lulu Kitololo have been selected to collaborate with Opera, the Norwegian browser developer, in creating original sticker packs for Hype, its new dedicated chat service.
Hype, the first African inspired chat service which is built into mobile browser Opera Mini offers its users a series of stickers created by the two Kenyan artists and as such, Opera has become the first major browser developer to collaborate with African artists.
“We are extremely happy to celebrate African culture with Hype. We are very excited to collaborate with Brian and Lulu. These unique stickers with original designs are something we are very proud of at Opera as we become the first major browser to integrate real African art and pop culture into our products,”said Charles Hamel, Product Lead for Hype.
Hype is launching first in Kenya as a pilot market, where starting today (Tuesday), users will be able to easily set up their Hype account and start chatting with secure end-to-end encryption.
Current messaging services were created almost a decade ago, and none of these has ever focused on having such a collaboration with local artists to make online conversations more engaging.
This unique offer from Hype stands out from other chat services and provides Kenyans the ability to express themselves more accurately when using chat apps.
“Hype also brings WebSnap, a feature previously known from the Opera desktop browser, that allows users to take snapshots from the web.Once a websnap is captured, users can edit it by adding colors, text, and emojis, making it fun and entertaining before sharing with others.”
WebSnap also allows users to smoothly share the link of the original website from which they took their snaps. This comes in handy as users no longer need to copy links from websites and switch between apps to share the content they want.