"Ni ya leo" is a Swahili phrase.

Swahili is a language widely spoken in East and Central Africa.

In English, the phrase translates to ‘it is fresh' or, put in another way, ‘it is the latest'.

In Nairobi's open air municipal markets, traders are known to yell “ni ya leo!” in a bid to attract shopping members of the public as they pass by their stalls, making selections.

In looking for a name for a proposed shopping website, I was inspired by these traders and decided that my proposed website will be called niyaleo.

Niyaleo.com is envisaged to be an auction and shopping portal. Initially, buyers and sellers will not be charged anything. However, later on, it is expected that a mobile payment service (currently popular in Kenya) will be integrated with the system.

The portal will deal in all kinds of goods and will target the tens of thousands of web-savvy East Africans, many of them educated to university level and who are often to be found on Facebook. In essence, the target market of the shopping website will mostly be young urban professionals, businessmen and students. The common thread is that they are modern and demanding.

Having stated the foregoing, I am looking for a slick, easy-to-remember text logo to be designed for the proposed website. The logo should be able to communicate with an elite crop of urban Kenyans of the type that is into movies, Facebook, blogs, iPods and clubbing.

Not only should the logo identify with such trendy people, it should also reek of Africanness.

If you are interested in devising the logo, please take some time to understand the culture of urban Nairobi and modern Kenyans. Although I desire of a text-based logo, outstanding concepts based on one that combines text and graphics can be considered.

The logo will be the primary brand identity for the shopping website and will, therefore, be used in all branding endeavours and advertisement media.

Interested designers must showcase previous works as testimony to their ingenious abilities and expertise in designing a logo for niyaleo.com.

And since the next phase will be to design the niyaleo.com website, parties that are capable in coming up with creative auction websites based on Joomla, PHP, Ajax and CSS can also express interest...


Kariz.