Babbel is one of the biggest language learning apps in the world, but the app itself had started to show its age. It was designed for an older generation of phones and didn't make the most of what modern devices can do. Next to newer apps it felt flat, and the team knew the experience needed to catch up with the quality of the teaching behind it.

To start, we looked at how the app could use modern devices properly. That meant designing for larger edge-to-edge screens, more natural gestures and richer motion, so the app felt at home on a new phone rather than carried over from an old one.

Photography became the heart of the new visual direction. Learning a language is really about places, people and moments, and we wanted every lesson to feel connected to the real world. The challenge was scale. Babbel covers a huge number of languages, topics and scenarios, and shooting or illustrating all of them by hand would have taken years.

This is where AI generation came in. We used it to create high-fidelity imagery for lessons and scenarios, carefully art directed so it stayed consistent with the brand and felt natural rather than artificial. That gave us a level of visual richness across the whole app that simply wouldn't have been possible otherwise.