Translucide Collective: "We force ourselves to develop the minimum — even to remove features"

Translucide, created in 2019, offers eco-designed and accessible websites with a focus on sobriety and inclusion. An interview with graphic designer Maud Subiry and developers Simon Vandaele, Mathieu Vigou Didierjean, and Thibault Dugast, all four members of the collective.

Field

Écologie

Keywords

DevelopmentWebCarbon Footprint

By Jérémy Pastouret

December 9, 2025

20 min

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Crédit : Translucide Collective

Simon Vandaele

Full Stack Developer & creator of the Translucide CMS

Creator of the eco-designed content management system (CMS): Translucide. For several years now, I have also specialized in digital accessibility.

Maud Subiry

Freelance Graphic Designer

I felt the need to include my ecological commitment in my professional life. I joined the Translucide collective in 2021.

Mathieu Vigou Didierjean

Full Stack Web Developer & Trainer

Access42 certified for RGAA accessibility and conducts training sessions and awareness workshops.

Thibault Dugast

Full Stack Web Developer

I work in both front-end and back-end, am Access42 certified for RGAA accessibility, and also share my knowledge through courses and conferences.

Can you introduce Translucide?

The Translucide collective was created in 2019. We are four eco-design specialists, building websites that best meet the needs of our clients while limiting ecological impact as much as possible. With more than a hundred sites to our name, we also create websites that are 100% compliant with the General Accessibility Improvement Framework (RGAA) for maximum inclusion. We also work to raise awareness about the impacts of digital technology (environmental, social, societal, cognitive, etc.).

Why did you create an eco-designed content management tool? What is the issue with existing tools?

The creation of a new eco-designed tool was done by Simon. A pioneer in this field, he noticed that no website creation tool in 2019 (and very few today) had been designed, to his knowledge, with the intention of reducing its own ecological impact. From the start, the tool (what we call a CMS: Content Management System) was designed with the following constraints:

  • Have the minimum number of files (building the CMS with only two files turned out to be too restrictive). (1)
  • Use only proven programming languages (HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript), which will remain valid even after many years — avoiding new languages created and backed by Google, for example.
  • Be very efficient so as to use server and browser resources as little as possible, avoiding obsolescence: reducing the size and complexity of page templates, limiting database queries, and minimizing external dependencies (code that requires fetching information from another server, and is beyond our control... since that code may stop working at any time).
  • Have a simple and uncluttered content-editing interface.
  • Keep things simple: cover 80% of situations — and develop new features only when necessary.

This last requirement is particularly relevant if you are familiar with various site-editing tools. WordPress, for example, aims to cover as many use cases as possible. Layers of code are added on top of previous ones to "improve" it. Imagine how many layers have been added since 2003: it has become an *obesiciel* (2) (like Word and many other software tools).

The Translucide CMS was created with the opposite logic. We force ourselves to keep the minimum number of layers, even to remove features. We add a layer or feature only for a specific client, and only if it seems necessary. This logic is, to us, the most relevant to preserve an eco-design approach.

This also introduces constraints: someone who doesn’t know HTML, CSS, or PHP will not be able to build a site with the Translucide CMS.

Why choose Open Source?

Open source (6), or more precisely free software (7), is aligned with what we defend: creating a common good that stands in opposition to the capitalist system, characterized by privatization. Translucide exists because others have shared their knowledge. It is now our turn to do the same.

Why choose PHP, even though it is not part of the latest generation of languages?

One of the goals of eco-design is durability. To apply this, we decided to stay with the basic languages of the Web (PHP, HTML, CSS, MySQL, and a bit of JavaScript when necessary). This allows us to be compatible with older browser versions, and gives us peace of mind about the evolution of the code in the coming years. This ensures a long life for our sites, even without maintenance. This seems much harder to guarantee with more recent languages.

In reality, most consumer web hosting services provide these basic web languages. Other languages are often talked about, but it is these proven technologies that run most of the Web. In the end, we developers have just been making HTML pages for decades.

You offer surprising features such as site opening hours: can you tell us more about that?

We don’t highlight this feature much — you have to look in the configuration file to find it. This feature allows you to "close" a site (make it inaccessible) during specific hours.

It fits the same approach of impact reduction. This feature’s purpose is to make site administrators aware. We (people in so-called “rich” countries) consider the Internet to be always available. Yet this requirement demands many resources (material and human). This feature reminds us that things could be otherwise. One could even imagine requiring it to comply with the French law on the right to disconnect (3), which relates to the attention economy.

However, it is not an eco-design feature as one might imagine: the server (the machine hosting the website) does not shut down — at least not with this feature. It therefore does not meaningfully save energy. Worse, it adds a few lines to our CMS... but we consider them acceptable given the reasoning and the new perspective on digital life it encourages.

Other features are also meant to help, inform, and raise awareness among administrators. For example, when saving a modification on a page, we quickly check whether the images are too heavy. We roughly calculate the page’s ecoIndex score (4) regarding eco-design, and we can even verify a few RGAA compliance elements (5).

Most of eco-design work happens upstream, in functional choices. But during production, we try to set a maximum objective per page (number of files, file weight, media size) to contain display and execution performance.

Does Translucide allow you to make a living?

Yes, today it allows four people to earn a living. But this was not without sacrifice, and even today, it is still unstable. When Simon began the CMS, he spent a year without any pay. Even today, he develops the Translucide CMS mainly on a volunteer basis (9), and it is custom themes that allow the collective to earn income.

Today, things are becoming increasingly difficult. We know that several web companies or micro-businesses have already closed down. On our side, we added another string to our bow: for the last two years, we have trained and already created several websites 100% compliant with the General Accessibility Improvement Framework (5).

Another factor that has allowed us to survive so far: we do not aspire to become rent-seekers. We would rather refuse a client whose goals contradict our worldview than sign a lucrative contract. Some say we are precarious, others that we are lucky to have enormous freedom.

Is eco-designing websites still useful in a time of massive AI usage and agents crawling the Web for us?

People talk a lot about artificial intelligence today. Our observation is that, for now, even though AI is being forced (10) into our digital environments, we still visit websites — even if it is possible to obtain a lot of (sometimes false) information by asking an AI. Also, with Google’s agents crawling the Web 24/7 since a site’s first indexing, it is increasingly difficult to rank well against large organizations (and their marketing budgets) and the opacity of Google’s algorithms (11).

Many of the eco-designed websites we build today serve as guarantees: they prove, detail, and promote the mindset of a structure. Except for public websites, which serve a different purpose: serving all citizens.

Eco-design is also about working in the most frugal way. Avoiding AI is also a guarantee of sobriety, humanity, and quality in our eyes. The digital world before the rise of AI already increased our ecological impact. Will AI enable us to accomplish something that cancels the impact created by its manufacturing and use? We allow ourselves to doubt it.

The goal of our collective is to allow humans to communicate. As tool-makers, we strive to re-humanize relationships between living beings. For example, we often recommend favoring human interaction rather than certain website features. Eco-design is, in a way, a way to resist a world that is becoming increasingly industrialized and is destroying human relationships — in addition to destroying the environment (notably by extracting deep underground resources).

If we go a little further and imagine a Web where AI reorganizes all information found online: at minimum, it will be necessary to know the sources of everything AI repeats, because while you can find interesting information on the Internet, you can also encounter a lot of nonsense. AI is not conscious; it does not know the meaning of words; it holds no responsibility. It is there to calculate and optimize. Let us remember that AIs were created by companies whose primary goal is to make money, to accumulate capital (12). So we cannot expect ethics, equality, or greater happiness for us (13).

Your vision of the web is radically opposed to the current trend of over-production of features and content... You even propose de-digitization: can you explain how this translates into daily practice?

It is a very simple approach — one only needs to dare follow it. It answers the question: “Do you really need it?” Two prerequisites are needed:

  1. We must act in good faith: our priority is to best meet the needs of our clients while being aware of the impact of digital technology (slavery, water, air and soil pollution... in short, a deterioration of the lives of humans, other living beings, and the planet).
  2. Our client must be in good faith: eco-design often means reducing quantity and increasing quality. Not everyone is ready for this, because for each feature, one must ask: do I really need it?

This is an exercise where we like to go further than most of our competitors and ask whether the tool or feature is worth the cost it induces. One of Simon’s favorite quotes summarizes this well: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

As for de-digitization, it is the same principle on a larger scale: after determining whether a tool or feature is useful, we look at how to apply it. Strangely, in our digitized society, the digital answer to a problem is not always the best answer. In an increasingly unequal society, pen and paper are sometimes more inclusive. In a society that does not want to be mortifying, digital technology should facilitate access to a service — not, as today, be a required condition for accessing it.

Can people still contribute to the CMS? If so, how (without risking making it heavier or more complex)?

Absolutely: the CMS is available on Framagit (14). You can download it, fork it, use it, and even suggest improvements. To do so, you must follow the contribution guidelines (15). These explain the sobriety-driven approach of the project. Internally, we usually place new features in client themes. If they prove truly useful for everyone, we include them in the CMS after several months of usage. But the simplest thing is to talk to us first. You can contact us using the form and we will be happy to reply.

Final word

Let us take the time to answer the question: “Is this the future I want to create for myself, my children, my nieces and nephews, and my loved ones?”

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