Namchetolukla

The name came to my wife while we were venturing around the Himalayan mountains. We met in Nepal in late 2015, and from then on, we have been inseparable. One of the most enjoyable trek was going from Namche back to Lukla. It was 12 hours of undulating paths, laughter, teamwork, and stories.

Namchetolukla is more than a photography website; we want it to grow with our written content on metaphysics, philosophy, stories and videos to help spread awareness and inspire others in meaningful ways.

I started my own business with my wife, and I wanted to expand my creativity outside of design.

Background

I have been in photography for the last 15 years – dipping in and out of it at every opportunity I had – with an emphasis on meaning. I want my photography to tell a story of a personal journey that aspires to expose awareness to others. My wife has a passion for creating and capturing beauty. She is a hopeless romantic with a love for nature and exploration. Her talent lies in uncovering the narrative embedded within the people and places around her. We realised together that we could turn our abilities and passions into a lifestyle change. 

Brand

From Within, From Without – The idea of working on my own business has come around several times. It was essential for us to bring our skills into photography. To achieve the goal of connecting our thoughts and ideas with people worldwide. We had to draw from within and without.

Our main goal was to inspire and raise awareness through photography, using our writing skills to add more depth through our stories, journeys and personal experiences.

We weren’t sure what the logo would look like and how it would feel. We knew that our brand had three core values: Honest, Real and Conscious.
 

Logo

A goldfish is a unique animal as it adapts itself to its current environment. It has a quintessential philosophy of balance and harmony as it grows to huge sizes inside the ocean or shrinks inside a confined space such as a fishbowl. We wanted our logo to adapt itself to the space it would be presented with, much like a goldfish. Our logo inherits our core values of consideration, simplicity and focus. We wanted it to be present but adapt its size and colour to the environment.

This approach disrupted a couple of design methodologies but allowed the logo to be in harmony rather than consistent.

A) Our strapline is to inspire and raise awareness through photography which helped us look at the foundation of our logo: a shot of a scene, that moment of a story.

B) We wanted the logo to adapt to the scene, taking on the colours and growing/shrinking to suit its surroundings.

By default, the logo had to be square or rectangular like a photograph, but it wouldn’t be constrained to that shape if it had to fill a different form.

Design

The design brings together a language that feels and looks fluent and natural in its environment. It can be almost anything, but it has this natural expression across any medium. That was one of the critical factors for the design; to give ourselves the tools to express content across any required medium.

Language allows us to express our thoughts to others – it is the very foundation of our society. And so, design language needs to occupy a similar space within the design world.

Number system

A design language needs to incorporate a number system that gives designers a scale of numbers that allows them to make consistent decisions. This number system also starts to create an invisible design that cannot necessarily be seen but felt on a subconscious level. Just like the scale of our human bodies, we cannot see the choices made by nature but once we get into the maths, we see that Phi is nearly in everything natural.

And by using our own number system, we are trying to replicate what nature has been doing for over 13 billion years.

The rule of thirds also plays a big part in photography, so it felt fitting to use this sequence of numbers as a fundamental design attribute. Odd numbers also provide symmetry in designs.

3, 6, 9

With this in mind, I decided to use the Fibonacci sequence to create numbers in a harmonious way that would bind all the designs together in that invisible fashion.

I also created another set of numbers that followed multiples of 3 to ensure the design had enough breathing space.

Grid

Using the foundations of our number system, I was able to create a grid that worked across our website. I made sure that all numbers would be divisible by 3 – allowing for continuity through our designs.

One of the important decisions for our design language was to establish a clean, simple and emotive link to our readers and customers. Typography can be a very strong way of doing that.

We looked through a couple of different type faces and felt that Proxima Nova connected with us the most. It’s a simple and geometric font with a large family of rounded and condensed variations with many weights which makes this type face very versatile for our long term goals.

Break

points

Responsive websites have become the norm. We need to be able to showcase our content to all of our users, no matter the device. Our stats show that 60% of our visitors use mobile phones to view our content. These stats showed us how important it is for our whole shopping experience to work as seamlessly as possible on a mobile phone.

Templates

I started looking into the type of content that could be featured on our website – a shop, articles, travel stories, video posts, quotes, and audio. It helped bring together an array of atoms and components to construct the templates used across the website.

Development

I wanted to use a CMS that didn’t cost us any monthly bills, as those expenses can hurt a business that is just starting. We also wanted a single CMS to house our content and shop, as this would make updating and adding content much easier and more secure. WordPress has an array of functionality and plugins that make it a versatile platform for our content and shop, so it felt like the right fit for this project.

I’ve also been using LESS, a pre-compiler for CSS, for the last six years, and I’ve found that it has made my life a lot easier when creating websites from scratch. During the creation of my website, I built a LESS framework that gave me a toolkit to quickly start writing CSS with all the necessary code to normalise any browser quirks.

I prefer building a website from scratch rather than pre-built templates, as they can lead to more issues. This approach makes updating the website much more manageable, knowing where everything is. It has also allowed me to appreciate the work and dedication involved in front and back end teams. This integral understanding has been vital when I’ve been working with development teams – to be able to speak in their language.

Final Designs

Capture

It is important for us to capture and express our thoughts and ideas. I feel that we have equipped ourselves with the necessary tools to do that.

Namchetolukla is not a just a brand or an image, it’s the collective development of us as a couple as we aspire to motivate, educate and relate to people on a personal level. Our passion for culture and creativity gives us a vibrant flair that strives to spread honesty, compassion and gratitude. We are our happiest and most connected selves when we are surrounded by natural beauty, capturing unique moments, or giving back to others.