Article
Xavier Mathieu On The Design Of 99designs.com
Recently, Matthew Magain caught up with Xavier Mathieu, the designer responsible for creating the new 99designs.com web site design.
Over a hard-fought game of foosball, Matthew quizzed Xavier on his design decisions, the challenges he faced in creating a new visual identity for a large design community, and his thoughts on the concept of "design contests."
Disclosure: 99designs was founded by a team of former SitePointers. We still let them use our espresso machine every now and then.
SitePoint: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me Xavier. First up, tell our readers a bit about yourself and your experience as a designer.
Well, I've always been fairly creative. I was always building things as a kid -- lamps, pen holders, that kind of thing ... I had a real interest in industrial design. I also played with lots of Lego, which I really believe gave me lots of practice at being creative!
In terms of my education I attended LISAA, which is a private design school in Paris, France. Design school taught me how to develop a professional approach to graphic design, and all of our assignments were real-world examples, so making the leap from student life to the professional world wasn't difficult.
I teamed up with a couple of friends from my college after graduating, and we freelanced for a few years in France before I moved to Australia. Those few years definitely gave me a broad range of experiences.
Outside of work I really enjoy outdoor sports. Rollerskating, cycling ... recently I've taken up kite surfing, which I discovered since moving to Melbourne. I love it! Plus it keeps me fit.
SitePoint: What are the tools that you use when designing a web site?
Adobe Illustrator. That's it. I love working with vectors because they're crisp and clean, which reflects my own design style, I think. I'm fanatical about small details, and once you master it, Illustrator makes it easy to make small changes to show a client.
SitePoint: So what is 99designs, Xavier?
99designs is basically a large design community that competes for design projects. Anyone can start a contest to have something designed -- be that a logo, a web site, a t-shirt, or something else –- and the designers compete for the prize.
SitePoint: The new site looks great. Do you have anything that you can share with us from the early stages when you were fleshing out concepts?
Yeah, I do actually. When I first started I had two main concepts that I was exploring. This is the grid layout for one of the ideas. I want to insist, however, that is the very first mockup that I did.
While it might not look that impressive, creating mockups like this -- even if I discard them -- is an essential part of the process I follow. I like to explore possible directions and get those ideas down, and then either use them, tweak them, or discard them.
I wanted to incorporate elements from the graphic design world, so one idea was to use the colour halftone effect that you see when you zoom in on a four-colour print job. The site is all about graphic design, which is why I wanted to draw inspiration from the traditional design world.
SitePoint: I definitely think you made the right choice. That's a pretty radical colour scheme, too. What were your thinking at this stage?
I wanted to have really bright, fluoro colours on that mockup especially. But I didn't like it -- it doesn't work here at all. In fact, I can't remember why I chose those colours. They were probably just the first colours I thought of.
SitePoint: You knew beforehand that the logo for this site was going to be designed by the 99designs.com community. How did that shape your design?
It was the first time that I'd worked in that way -- creating a visual identity, and then adding the logo afterwards. But the end result proves that it can work. It may not be ideal for every project, but it worked well in this case. The logo the team chose is quite flexible, so it could probably be used with a number of different styles.
SitePoint: How did you decide upon the colour scheme for the final design that was chosen?
I chose the orange to represent the creativity of the designers -- orange is such a popular colour among designers. The purple is more representative of institutions -- for the contest holders. These colours are two of the three colours that form a triad on the colour wheel (green is the third). They complement each other well, as one is warm and one is cool.
SitePoint: So the association with SitePoint didn't influence your design decisions?
No, 99designs is a completely separate company, even though both of the brands use orange, and I guess there are similarities between the orange/blue and the orange/purple colour schemes. But the orange we used on 99designs.com is much redder -- it's quite red compared to the bright SitePoint orange.
Having said that, when the site launched last week and I read through the list of changes that had been made, I noticed that the orange had actually changed! The community feedback was that it was too bright! I think the exact wording was "A more muted shade of orange (for those of you that don't wear sunglasses)." I still like the original orange better, but that's okay.