I got through this entire article before I realized it was written by someone I worked with back in my agency days. Beth is an awesome designer with a great eye. Nice to see her on the front page here. Now, to the content: I often wonder how much we have lost with our endless quest for minimalism. We can't even make buttons look like buttons anymore. Affordances have become anemic at times. Designers who think and care deeply about functional color theory and usable design should be cherished.
I'm reminded of an article a while back talking about how the change from sodium streetlights to LED streetlights had a whole lot of unforeseen effects on animals, people's sleep patterns, driver awareness and visibility, etc. due to color changes. There was a comment on the article from an old civil engineer saying "no, these were not unforeseen, we actually did the research back in the day to figure out what color the street lights should be, that's why they were the color they were."
That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting). Low-pressure sodium is the best and worst of these; essentially monochromatic but fantastic efficiency. Their only advantage, color-wise, is that the light can be filtered out easily (they used to be widely used in San Jose because Lick Observatory could filter out the 589 nm light).
I think we've learned a couple of times that lighting placement, temperature, and shadow-casting are not ideal [0]. Also some of the newer lighting does actually fade to a different color [1] so it's not just the base temperature of the new lights.
I'm sure tons of people along the way "noticed" but if you're selling LEDs or you're paid by the LED people to create marketing to convince people that LEDs are gonna save the planet, you're not gonna bring that up.
While I am sure there are stylistic reasons for using that color, there is another common reason why you see blue-green colors in paint, especially in older industrial environments: zinc chromate/phosphate corrosion protective coatings. Zinc chromate primer is the color you see on the interior surfaces of some aircraft, to inhibit corrosion. Zinc phosphate is more of a gray in most cases, although varying paint chemistries result in a spectrum between those two, with seafoam nearly smack in the middle.
These are still available today, although the chromate version seems less popular for general use due to toxicity, especially (I assume) in the case of a fire.
I have painted quite a few bits of sheet metal with a sea-foam-ish blue-green/gray paint back in the day (30 years or so ago). I don't recall the manufacturer, but it was a zinc conversion coating in nearly exactly that seafoam color, which has probably stolen at least a few years of my life expectancy. The same company sold other paints in a sickly mustard yellow, and close to fire-engine red, all with slightly different chemistries, I assume for different base metals.
A gas station near me painted their bollards this color. I've wondered if this would be a credible legal defense for someone that accidentally backed into them.
Go Away reads to me as a command to the viewer to go away rather than the intended "we want the object to go away from the viewer's thoughts". If they were okay with a phrase like Go Away Green, why not something like Hidden View Green, Irrelevant Green, Don't Look Here Green, etc. Some PR department would have a field day
It's so nice to see colors in any kind of government, industrial, or commercial building. The "everything must be gray/beige" fad has dominated institutional interior design for at least 30 years. Maybe it's just nostalgia, I remember the wall colors in banks, schools, doctor's offices, mcdonalds, and so on in the 1970s and they seemed so wonderful. All these things got a coat of white paint sometime in the 2000s and look the same as everywhere else now.
I feel that too. My house had significant chunks painted a vivid aquamarine when I moved in 2018, and my now-ex insisted that we paint over it all in grey.
After she moved out, I put up greens, yellows, brown, and blue all over the house. It's not quite as "public pool" feeling as that original aquamarine, but it's certainly more lively than grey/white. Funny enough though, when I had a designer come in to take measurements and do a mockup for a kitchen reno... everything was back to white because that's step one in making it look "modern" even though part of the pitch is custom cabinetry that won't just look like that same white IKEA stuff that everyone installs now.
It's common for homes especially when prepped for sale because neutral colors won't clash with whatever the potential buyer might want to bring in e.g. furniture, artwork, or other decor.
Most of the rooms in my house are painted in colors and I mostly like it but it can sometimeds feel fatiguing. I've thought about repainting in a neutral gray or green.
I had to get my whole house repainted after a kitchen fire. Have some black and a lot of white (trim and ceilings) but also subtle green in upstairs rooms and very subtle orange everywhere else. Kept it simple but prefer it to everything being a light gray like a relative has. There still aren’t that many different paints if retouching is ever needed.
I wonder if the designers of cold war soviet planes read the same color theory because their cockpits are always a very particular indescribable shade of green. There were also very specific colors for subsystems, yellow for fuel, purple for hydraulics etc. Much more than the contemporary US designs.
My father was a mechanic and crew chief working on F-14's during his time in the air force. His two takeaways from his service were: 1. No one should ever join the military for any reason ever forever, and 2. Somebody needs to color code literally anything.
He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same color made of the same material.
The exterior being gray makes sense - harder to see with human eyes. But internals? They should be massively contrasting colors for every single series of pieces to be removed so you can just follow along by color.
Tangentially, this reminds me of stories from my dad who got some kind of special award for having made their ship radar the best in the fleet.
Sometime before that, he got a lot of flak for having neglected one of the standing rules, to label everything as you take it apart and put it back "the way you found it". He decided to break it down and put it back the way the technical documentation said it should actually go. This seems to be part of the reason his radar performed better than the others after teardown maintenance.
Cheaper to buy huge spools of gray clad wiring than a lot of different color coded wires? Also you don't have to stock a lot of different colors for repairs.
That color shows up a lot in stairways apartment blocks and school corridors and bathrooms in ex-Soviet bloc countries.
My two guesses are that it was colored like that get the pilots feel like they were in a particular environment - a familar but not exactly private or comfortable one. It's a cultural thing like if you paint a bus yellow, Americans will think of a school bus, but most other people won't.
My other guess is that they only made certain kinds of dye, and its very well possible the same factory made it that made it for bathroom tiles. In capitalism, if you don't have orange paint, for example, some company will just start making it if there's a demand.
In communism, if nobody makes it, then it's not available, until and if some comittee decides that it should be made.
There's a cross-modal correspondence angle here that I don't see mentioned.
The research on why certain colors feel calm points to the same perceptual substrate as why certain sounds feel calm. Low-chroma, mid-value colors (seafoam, sage, dusty blue) register as low-arousal across multiple measures, and that low-arousal quality maps predictably to other sensory modalities. The Bouba/Kiki effect is the famous example: rounded shapes feel like bouba, angular ones feel like kiki, cross-linguistically. But it extends to color -- rounded phonemes (/m/, /n/, /l/) tend to be rated more compatible with low-chroma colors than stop consonants.
So the seafoam choice might be overdetermined: it works physiologically (low stimulation for long monitoring sessions) AND cognitively (low-arousal color category activates low-arousal associations across the board, keeping operators from overcorrecting on ambiguous signals).
The independent Russian cockpit convergence is interesting evidence for this. If it were purely cultural you would expect more divergence.
Seeing all those two-tone walls with green blow and cream above, I bet it isn't coincidental that those tones resemble plants under an overcast outdoor sky.
Either because of unconscious choice, or because some designer theorized that people would be biologically primed to prefer it.
Would be cool to get an original copy of "Colors for Interiors: Historical and Modern by Faber Birren" and create color matches assuming it's not faded too much. I wonder if he created some kind of pigmentation ratio (or however paint coloring works) that he shared somewhere?
> We once went on a tour to spot bald eagles in West Tennessee, and upon arrival, a woman with fluffy hair in the state park bathroom told us she had seen 113 bald eagles the day before. We ended up seeing (counts on one hand)…2.
As a semi professional eagle enjoyer, if the day before was trash day, then she might have been telling the truth. I’m not joking, they have bald eagle proofed dumpsters in Alaska.
We took a trip to Alaska via RV, and were parked at a roadside. I got up at 11:30pm at "night" (broad daylight) to use the restroom and was so annoyed by the seagulls I went outside to yell at them.
It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.
Have always been a fan of colors like that for my desktop background. Maybe because it's calming and I don't realize it?
I'm not sure if it started with the teal from Windows 95's default color (hex codes vary based on Google searches), or if it was a purple-ish color from a classic Mac from school.
To this day, my work Mac is teal and my personal is purple.
On US submarines, every bulkhead and beam not in the bilge is painted seafoam green. We were told it was the most soothing/ anti-rage inducing color possible - necessary for long deployments in cramped quarters.
After a little over a decade of service, no other color infuriates me more
Silver lining, at least your triggered by a color that basically doesn't exist and is no longer in wide spread use. (As in you won't find it as much in daily civilian life)
Ha, I am very proud that I made that discovery independently as well. In the Light vs Dark theme, I settled on a light greyish green that is somewhat close to the one described here. It really does reduce eye fatigue.
As the son of a machine tools salesman, I call the article bullshit. Sometimes things just need to be painted and sometimes you just need that WW2 surplus paint to do the job, with the colour not mattering one bit.
With anything, an academic can thread together a theory that neatly joins the dots to sound feasible, but my bet is that 99% of all engineers are stronger at physics than color theory.
I got through this entire article before I realized it was written by someone I worked with back in my agency days. Beth is an awesome designer with a great eye. Nice to see her on the front page here. Now, to the content: I often wonder how much we have lost with our endless quest for minimalism. We can't even make buttons look like buttons anymore. Affordances have become anemic at times. Designers who think and care deeply about functional color theory and usable design should be cherished.
I'm reminded of an article a while back talking about how the change from sodium streetlights to LED streetlights had a whole lot of unforeseen effects on animals, people's sleep patterns, driver awareness and visibility, etc. due to color changes. There was a comment on the article from an old civil engineer saying "no, these were not unforeseen, we actually did the research back in the day to figure out what color the street lights should be, that's why they were the color they were."
> that's why they were the color they were
That doesn't seem right to me. Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps are the color they are due to physics, and were chosen because they're very efficient (and long lasting). Low-pressure sodium is the best and worst of these; essentially monochromatic but fantastic efficiency. Their only advantage, color-wise, is that the light can be filtered out easily (they used to be widely used in San Jose because Lick Observatory could filter out the 589 nm light).
I think we've learned a couple of times that lighting placement, temperature, and shadow-casting are not ideal [0]. Also some of the newer lighting does actually fade to a different color [1] so it's not just the base temperature of the new lights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower
[1] https://sigostreetlight.com/blogs/common-quality-problems-in...
I'm sure tons of people along the way "noticed" but if you're selling LEDs or you're paid by the LED people to create marketing to convince people that LEDs are gonna save the planet, you're not gonna bring that up.
While I am sure there are stylistic reasons for using that color, there is another common reason why you see blue-green colors in paint, especially in older industrial environments: zinc chromate/phosphate corrosion protective coatings. Zinc chromate primer is the color you see on the interior surfaces of some aircraft, to inhibit corrosion. Zinc phosphate is more of a gray in most cases, although varying paint chemistries result in a spectrum between those two, with seafoam nearly smack in the middle.
These are still available today, although the chromate version seems less popular for general use due to toxicity, especially (I assume) in the case of a fire.
I have painted quite a few bits of sheet metal with a sea-foam-ish blue-green/gray paint back in the day (30 years or so ago). I don't recall the manufacturer, but it was a zinc conversion coating in nearly exactly that seafoam color, which has probably stolen at least a few years of my life expectancy. The same company sold other paints in a sickly mustard yellow, and close to fire-engine red, all with slightly different chemistries, I assume for different base metals.
Reminds me of Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
A gas station near me painted their bollards this color. I've wondered if this would be a credible legal defense for someone that accidentally backed into them.
Go Away reads to me as a command to the viewer to go away rather than the intended "we want the object to go away from the viewer's thoughts". If they were okay with a phrase like Go Away Green, why not something like Hidden View Green, Irrelevant Green, Don't Look Here Green, etc. Some PR department would have a field day
Prob because Go Away Green sounds way cooler than all of those and it’s not a user facing term anyways.
It's so nice to see colors in any kind of government, industrial, or commercial building. The "everything must be gray/beige" fad has dominated institutional interior design for at least 30 years. Maybe it's just nostalgia, I remember the wall colors in banks, schools, doctor's offices, mcdonalds, and so on in the 1970s and they seemed so wonderful. All these things got a coat of white paint sometime in the 2000s and look the same as everywhere else now.
I feel that too. My house had significant chunks painted a vivid aquamarine when I moved in 2018, and my now-ex insisted that we paint over it all in grey.
After she moved out, I put up greens, yellows, brown, and blue all over the house. It's not quite as "public pool" feeling as that original aquamarine, but it's certainly more lively than grey/white. Funny enough though, when I had a designer come in to take measurements and do a mockup for a kitchen reno... everything was back to white because that's step one in making it look "modern" even though part of the pitch is custom cabinetry that won't just look like that same white IKEA stuff that everyone installs now.
It's common for homes especially when prepped for sale because neutral colors won't clash with whatever the potential buyer might want to bring in e.g. furniture, artwork, or other decor.
Most of the rooms in my house are painted in colors and I mostly like it but it can sometimeds feel fatiguing. I've thought about repainting in a neutral gray or green.
Install the boring shit and use colored vinal wrap for fun. Good resale value and you can enjoy life.
I had to get my whole house repainted after a kitchen fire. Have some black and a lot of white (trim and ceilings) but also subtle green in upstairs rooms and very subtle orange everywhere else. Kept it simple but prefer it to everything being a light gray like a relative has. There still aren’t that many different paints if retouching is ever needed.
Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.
[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
the Burt Reynolds poster
I wonder if the designers of cold war soviet planes read the same color theory because their cockpits are always a very particular indescribable shade of green. There were also very specific colors for subsystems, yellow for fuel, purple for hydraulics etc. Much more than the contemporary US designs.
My father was a mechanic and crew chief working on F-14's during his time in the air force. His two takeaways from his service were: 1. No one should ever join the military for any reason ever forever, and 2. Somebody needs to color code literally anything.
He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same color made of the same material.
The exterior being gray makes sense - harder to see with human eyes. But internals? They should be massively contrasting colors for every single series of pieces to be removed so you can just follow along by color.
Tangentially, this reminds me of stories from my dad who got some kind of special award for having made their ship radar the best in the fleet.
Sometime before that, he got a lot of flak for having neglected one of the standing rules, to label everything as you take it apart and put it back "the way you found it". He decided to break it down and put it back the way the technical documentation said it should actually go. This seems to be part of the reason his radar performed better than the others after teardown maintenance.
Cheaper to buy huge spools of gray clad wiring than a lot of different color coded wires? Also you don't have to stock a lot of different colors for repairs.
That color shows up a lot in stairways apartment blocks and school corridors and bathrooms in ex-Soviet bloc countries.
My two guesses are that it was colored like that get the pilots feel like they were in a particular environment - a familar but not exactly private or comfortable one. It's a cultural thing like if you paint a bus yellow, Americans will think of a school bus, but most other people won't.
My other guess is that they only made certain kinds of dye, and its very well possible the same factory made it that made it for bathroom tiles. In capitalism, if you don't have orange paint, for example, some company will just start making it if there's a demand.
In communism, if nobody makes it, then it's not available, until and if some comittee decides that it should be made.
The reason for the green stairways was the vast surplus of the green paint (used for military equipment) post-WW2.
There's a cross-modal correspondence angle here that I don't see mentioned.
The research on why certain colors feel calm points to the same perceptual substrate as why certain sounds feel calm. Low-chroma, mid-value colors (seafoam, sage, dusty blue) register as low-arousal across multiple measures, and that low-arousal quality maps predictably to other sensory modalities. The Bouba/Kiki effect is the famous example: rounded shapes feel like bouba, angular ones feel like kiki, cross-linguistically. But it extends to color -- rounded phonemes (/m/, /n/, /l/) tend to be rated more compatible with low-chroma colors than stop consonants.
So the seafoam choice might be overdetermined: it works physiologically (low stimulation for long monitoring sessions) AND cognitively (low-arousal color category activates low-arousal associations across the board, keeping operators from overcorrecting on ambiguous signals).
The independent Russian cockpit convergence is interesting evidence for this. If it were purely cultural you would expect more divergence.
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What's also interesting is the Russians adopted a similar color for aircraft cockpits, eg this MiG 31. https://cdn.jetphotos.com/full/2/75332_1265484412.jpg
Meanwhile the Yanks stayed with mil-spec gray on a similar ship, the F-15: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:F-15_Eagle_Cockpit.jpg
Seeing all those two-tone walls with green blow and cream above, I bet it isn't coincidental that those tones resemble plants under an overcast outdoor sky.
Either because of unconscious choice, or because some designer theorized that people would be biologically primed to prefer it.
This article is a gem, thank you. Now off to Sherwin-Williams to see what the equivalent color names are. I wonder if there are matching formula.
Would be cool to get an original copy of "Colors for Interiors: Historical and Modern by Faber Birren" and create color matches assuming it's not faded too much. I wonder if he created some kind of pigmentation ratio (or however paint coloring works) that he shared somewhere?
"Make a color theme for my terminal based on the Birren and DuPont master color safety code for the industrial plant industry."
I remember when I first started out in a job that I should have a green poster nearby to look at to "relax your eyes" every now and then.
> We once went on a tour to spot bald eagles in West Tennessee, and upon arrival, a woman with fluffy hair in the state park bathroom told us she had seen 113 bald eagles the day before. We ended up seeing (counts on one hand)…2.
As a semi professional eagle enjoyer, if the day before was trash day, then she might have been telling the truth. I’m not joking, they have bald eagle proofed dumpsters in Alaska.
They’re basically smart seagulls with talons.
We took a trip to Alaska via RV, and were parked at a roadside. I got up at 11:30pm at "night" (broad daylight) to use the restroom and was so annoyed by the seagulls I went outside to yell at them.
It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.
And here I assumed they sounded like red-tailed hawks!
Because chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment
This makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.
Also hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.
Have always been a fan of colors like that for my desktop background. Maybe because it's calming and I don't realize it?
I'm not sure if it started with the teal from Windows 95's default color (hex codes vary based on Google searches), or if it was a purple-ish color from a classic Mac from school.
To this day, my work Mac is teal and my personal is purple.
On US submarines, every bulkhead and beam not in the bilge is painted seafoam green. We were told it was the most soothing/ anti-rage inducing color possible - necessary for long deployments in cramped quarters.
After a little over a decade of service, no other color infuriates me more
Silver lining, at least your triggered by a color that basically doesn't exist and is no longer in wide spread use. (As in you won't find it as much in daily civilian life)
LOL I just bought a can of Dulux Sea Foam and one of Dulux Sea Foam Quarter yesterday
Old school SCADA screens that I first saw had a similar green background.
Some of the old retired US aircraft carriers have their control rooms painted this color.
Why don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.
> He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.
And? Did it?
I suppose that's up to us to judge
Su-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.
Yeah I was about to say similar pastel green colors crops up in a lot of Soviet control rooms too.
That’s a fascinating story!
I’d never even heard of this guy.
Ha, I am very proud that I made that discovery independently as well. In the Light vs Dark theme, I settled on a light greyish green that is somewhat close to the one described here. It really does reduce eye fatigue.
> There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible
Sure. But this is not one those things.
TL;DR: because mid-20th-century designers believed soft green reduced eye strain and improved focus.
Basically the same nonsensical belief as in regard the dark mode nowadays.
I don't even believe it's true. Green is just an army colour, that's pretty much it. Army uses army colours. Mystery solved.
It's the color of plants. A field of grass. Etc.
Maybe it even works better with the color of a clear blue sky above it.
Anyway, it's intuitive and not rocket science.
Why do doctors wear green?
As the son of a machine tools salesman, I call the article bullshit. Sometimes things just need to be painted and sometimes you just need that WW2 surplus paint to do the job, with the colour not mattering one bit.
With anything, an academic can thread together a theory that neatly joins the dots to sound feasible, but my bet is that 99% of all engineers are stronger at physics than color theory.
Half arsed article. Expected much more detail