Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

https://bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-many-control-rooms-were-seafoam

by Amorymeltzer • 4 months ago

1038 200 4 months ago

bethmathews.substack.com

d--b• 4 months ago

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.

ortusdux2• 4 months ago

Reminds me of Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green

dylan604• 4 months ago

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

vscode-rest• 4 months ago

Prob because Go Away Green sounds way cooler than all of those and it’s not a user facing term anyways.

TeMPOraL2• 4 months ago

"Move Along Green"

ortusdux2• 4 months ago

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.

evanjrowley• 4 months ago

The thin strip of yellow/black caution stripes on an otherwise unnoticable green conduit was so ironic it made me smile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green#/media/File:The_...

It's saying "DON'T NOTICE THIS! (also, please notice this!)"

jcalx• 4 months ago

Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.

[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...

somat• 4 months ago

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.

Loughla2• 4 months ago

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.

saltcured• 4 months ago

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.

SoftTalker2• 4 months ago

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.

eggsome• 4 months ago

Surely you mean F-15 right? (F-14 was exclusive to the Navy + Iran exports)

bityard• 4 months ago

I worked on military avionics in a previous life and all of the planes I worked on had miles of white wires. The reasons given to us were:

1. Cost savings when buying.

2. There are hundreds to thousands of wires in an aircraft, but there are NOT hundreds to thousands of different colors of wires (even if we allow for stripes, etc) that are readily distinguishable to an overworked airman hunched over in a dim, cramped avionics bay trying to fix a plane that needs to take off for a mission in an hour.

If you are lucky, the wires are numbered. But even if they are, you typically identify a wire by its connector pin and PRAY that the fault isn't a break somewhere back in the wiring harness.

NetMageSCW3• 4 months ago

Unfortunately when you get enough conductors you start running out of insulator colors and start running into the problems copper telephone lines had - using pairs of colors (base with stripe) and tracing get pretty hard at that point.

torginus• 4 months ago

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.

gukov• 4 months ago

The reason for the green stairways was the vast surplus of the green paint (used for military equipment) post-WW2.

dlcarrier• 4 months ago

I've noticed that both American and Soviet planes used greenish colors, but the American ones are a yellowish green, while the Soviet ones are a bluish green. I've always wondered if the American yellowish green was chosen because it's similar to the color of the zinc chromate primer used on those aircraft, so the transparency of the paint wouldn't be an issue.

jschveibinz• 4 months ago

The yellowish-green is the zinc chromate "passivation" coating to help prevent corrosion.

zczc• 4 months ago

They definitely knew, Soviet books on industrial design and architecture explicitly mention Birren [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="биррен"+зеленый&udm=36&tbs=... (search for Russian for "Birren"+green in 20th century books)

huflungdung• 4 months ago

Half arsed article. Expected much more detail

dogscatstrees• 4 months ago

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.

srmatto• 4 months ago

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?

3eb7988a1663• 4 months ago

Planet Money had a story about the quantization of color[0]. Prior to this, people would essentially bring in a flower, piece of pottery, etc that they wanted to color match for the particular piece at hand.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/1197961103/pantone-colors-law...

mgerdts• 4 months ago

In the late 80s I worked in an industrial controls shop. This is the type of place that makes the cabinets with all the buttons, switches, and lights commonly associated with nuke plant controls. Only we did mostly controls for paper making machinery for Kimberly-Clark, Appleton Papers, etc.

Most of our green cabinets were spotlite green. Seafoam green was rare. Both paint colors were prepared by our local sherwin Williams. The colors looked pretty much the same to me.

mlacks• 4 months ago

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

fgonzag• 4 months ago

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)

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 months ago

That’s a fascinating story!

I’d never even heard of this guy.

emmelaich2• 4 months ago

Gal.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 months ago

Gal.

Heh. That explains it. I was wondering what problem people had with the comment.

I was talking about Faber Birren. The article is basically about him. Definitely a guy.

It’s always a pleasure to be “corrected,” hereabouts…

ryandrake• 4 months ago

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.

mikepurvis• 4 months ago

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.

bobomonkey• 4 months ago

Install the boring shit and use colored vinal wrap for fun. Good resale value and you can enjoy life.

SoftTalker2• 4 months ago

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.

ghaff• 4 months ago

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.

xenadu02• 4 months ago

Because it's the least offensive. No one can yell at you or claim the color is "dated" if you stick to white/gray/black and a touch of stainless steel.

Sad to see how many houses are painted gray or beige in SF now. We are going to paint ours purple in protest.

unbalancedevh• 4 months ago

Reminds me of "Mr. Pine's Purple House"

inanutshellus• 4 months ago

This is cyclical.

We went from overwhelming color chaos of pink and green toilets, carpeted bathroom floors, and kaleidoscope wallpapers to calm, clean, and inoffensive shades of whites and "agreeable gray"s.

Soon enough people will stop thinking of those whites/grays as a fresh, low-chaos decoration decision and switch to thinking of it as oppressively boring and break out with fantastic ideas like ... green toilets and kaleidoscope wallpaper.

jscheel• 4 months ago

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.

roughly• 4 months ago

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."

linkjuice4all• 4 months ago

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...

cucumber37328422• 4 months ago

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.

SyzygyRhythm• 4 months ago

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).

throwaway274482• 4 months ago

The posted article seems like credulous commentary, though.

anthk2• 4 months ago

I miss the aesthetics of the support for the street light themselves too. In Spain they used to be curved with a 'crown' shaped top, looking 'classical' and less hard for the brain as straight lines make the brain really tired. We are used to fractal and curved designs from nature, not to fake perspective points in every city full of straight lines.

These could just reuse the current LED lamps by just redesigning the socket. Altough the materials should be changed as the old ones (I think they were ceramic and/or concrete?) could cause serious harms if they felt over random people walking around. And, yes, they can even break concrete pavement like nothing.

I remember hearing a falling lamp+case near my home and upon falling to the sidewalk it sounded like a bomb, I am no kidding, even the floor vibrated and the windows nearly crashed. These things were really sturdy, either concrete or cement. I would love the same design but in magnesium, which can be lighter and maybe as durable, altough I know ceramic/concrete can withstand anything.

justonceokay2• 4 months ago

I wouldn’t change it for the world. I grew up in Minneapolis and moved to Seattle, so I went in a single night from sodium lights everywhere in a 500 mile radius to LED. It feels safer (subjective), more pleasant to perform tasks in, and less depressing. I should note I care 0% what the animals think of the whole affair.

This is especially important at high latitudes where for months of the year the street lights provide more illumination than the sun for most working people.

drzaiusx11• 4 months ago

Another effect observed with LED street lights, especially in my area, is that many have shifted from white light to purple as a widespread manufacturing flaw causes their phosphor coating to fail.

The purple lights evoke a vaporwave/synthwave aesthetic like I'm in a bad 80s scifi movie. Unintentionally appropriate given the general state of things.

ErroneousBosh• 4 months ago

This could do with a little better colour design, but let me just give you this to look at:

https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/

Yeah. Skeuomorphism isn't dead. Buttons need to look like buttons. Sliders need to look like sliders.

You just know looking at it that when you click on the little buttons, they pop in slightly as the LEDs go on and off, right? Does it look cheesy and 80s and dated? Yeah it sounds cheesy and 80s and dated too.

FpUser• 4 months ago

Modern designers do not give rat's ass about ergonomics and functionality. Their ultimate design is an empty screen with some light gray color on white text and inability to distinguish between active (can interact with) and info elements

cade• 4 months ago

Ha. I didn't realize until I checked the comments that I worked with Beth in Nashville too! Not sure what that says about how I consume content these days... but she's delightful.

Two of my favorite classes in college were Color Studies and Typography. As a long time back end engineer, I would encourage anyone unfamiliar to spend at least a little bit of time looking into both. If you're at all intrigued, treat yourself to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St.... It will forever change how you look at text (hopefully for the better!).

sph• 4 months ago

Great book. I'm a great believer in leaving books behind for other people to enjoy. I left this one when I moved out of my previous flat, and I regret it every day.

anonu• 4 months ago

Some of the old retired US aircraft carriers have their control rooms painted this color.

pavel_lishin• 4 months ago

He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.

And? Did it?

vintermann• 4 months ago

I suppose that's up to us to judge

bluedino• 4 months ago

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.

ProllyInfamous4• 4 months ago

    #81D8D0 club, represent!

Tiffany green is a Top10 /hn/topbar color for a reason.

buildbot• 4 months ago

Mmmm it is quite nice

ProllyInfamous4• 4 months ago

You immediately know when you're logged out (because the topbar goes from soothing to bright orange).

hkleppe2• 4 months ago

what, can I change the topbar color?

hkleppe2• 4 months ago

aha, so I need more karma

ProllyInfamous4• 4 months ago

You'll need 251+ karma to do so.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors>

Apparently tiffany green is only a Top50 contender, these days... a few years ago it had been Top10 (I hadn't checked again until this comment).

kleton• 4 months ago

Because chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment

cmoski• 4 months ago

Old school SCADA screens that I first saw had a similar green background.

carabiner• 4 months ago

Su-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.

marginalia_nu• 4 months ago

Yeah I was about to say similar pastel green colors crops up in a lot of Soviet control rooms too.

karlgkk2• 4 months ago

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.

jaggederest• 4 months ago

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.

csours• 4 months ago

And here I assumed they sounded like red-tailed hawks!

karlgkk2• 4 months ago

I love watching them interact. I ended up ditching a show in Alaska to sit in a grocery parking lot and watched eagles quarrel for almost two hours. They're great.

cynicalsecurity• 4 months ago

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.

amelius• 4 months ago

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.

Theodores• 4 months ago

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.

vajrabum• 4 months ago

Uh, I think they didn't use WW2 surplus anything when they build Oak Ridge and Hanford before the end of WW2. I also think given that those two plants were key bits of the Manhattan Project that they didn't cheap out on anything. And the color dude was in fact hired by DuPont who built those two plants and adopted his theories because they increased measured factory productivity and safety. Lastly the OG dude in the article was not an engineer. In fact he was an art school dropout who was very interested in color. So no on the no.

Ylpertnodi• 4 months ago

Why do doctors wear green?

mc2112• 4 months ago

Green is the opposite color of red (blood) on the color wheel and it was supposed to reduce visual fatigue. I think green scrubs have fallen out of favor in many places, but that was one of the prevailing reasons.

prewett• 4 months ago

I think the reason that I like dark mode is that I have had floaters in my eyes since at least age 14. They stand out against a bright white window background, but I don't notice them at all on a dark window with light text.

Or maybe it's just because that's how IBM PC DOS, BASICA, etc., as well as the VT100, VT220, VT300s that I used did it.

(Also, I think displays should paint with light, and having a white background is painting darkness on a computer screen. It's particularly bad for presentation slides. A light background just screams "PowerPoint presentation".)

Terr_• 4 months ago

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.

d-us-vb• 4 months ago

The purpose stated in the article in the mind of Birren was to reduce eye strain. I don't think it's so much that humans "prefer" it as such, more that we're very well adapted to work in environments with lots of it.

djmips• 4 months ago

Good thought! See also the Go-Away Green comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green

Rantenki• 4 months ago

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.

gosub100• 4 months ago

I remember reading a long time ago about why barns / shipping containers are dark red. and IIRC it's simply because it's a very similar tone to iron oxide and thus the dye was cheapest to produce.

jasonwatkinspdx• 4 months ago

Not quite right.

Iron oxide is anti-microbial. So a barn painted with it as a pigment will last longer vs mold and such.

It's also why large ships all have that red paint color below the waterline. In that case it's copper oxide, which helps slow barnacle growth and similar.

Back in the age of sail they even went as far as copper sheet cladding to make the wooden hulls last longer. Copper oxide pigment emerged toward the end of the age of sail / beginning of the steamship era as a more practical alternative.

HerbManic• 4 months ago

This reminding me of something my granddad demonstrated once.

He used to work on yachts a fair bit and over the years he noticed the fading patterns for different colour paints.

Yellow paint would fade, red paint would fade. But if you mixed them 50/50 into orange, it wouldn't fade. That's why they had so many orange boats in the bay. Figure that one out.

Citizen_Lame2• 4 months ago

It comes down to each pigment acting as a UV shield for the other. Paint fades because specific wavelengths of light (mostly UV and high-energy visible light) break down the chemical bonds in pigment molecules. The key is that different pigments are vulnerable to different wavelengths.

Yellow pigment absorbs blue and violet light. That's what makes it look yellow, it reflects the longer wavelengths and soaks up the shorter ones. But the UV and violet radiation it's absorbing is also what gradually destroys it.

Red pigment does something similar but across a different band, it absorbs greens and shorter wavelengths, and that absorption is what degrades it over time.

When you mix them 50/50 into orange, each pigment is absorbing the wavelengths that would have destroyed the other one.

next_xibalba2• 4 months ago

There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible

Sure. But this is not one those things.

whostolemyhat• 4 months ago

Did you read the next sentence?

NetMageSCW3• 4 months ago

That’s exactly the point. What “this” did you think was being referred to?

next_xibalba2• 4 months ago

Yes, of course. Let me clarify:

The implication of the quoted sentence is that the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on Japan was awful and indefensible. The author then transitions to “but I want to talk about part of the Manhattan project that isn’t really related to the bombings.” What other explanation would there be for inserting this comment about U.S. history?

My comment was addressing the defensibility of the bombings. They may have been awful, but they were fully defensible. Japan was the aggressor, and all indications were that both the U.S. and Japan were going to see millions of casualties as part of an invasion of the home islands.

fortran773• 4 months ago

I'm with you.

fortran773• 4 months ago

"The Manhattan Project created the nuclear bomb that caused extreme devastation in Japan and ended the war. There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible."

That's one hell of a non-sequitur. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what she thinks it means. "The US ended the worst war in human history. Indefensible!"

pbohun• 4 months ago

This makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.

imglorp• 4 months ago

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

bennyp101• 4 months ago

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.

bloak• 4 months ago

Also hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.

emmelaich2• 4 months ago

Yes, a feature of the movie "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" is a sort of sickly green.

I think hospitals have moved entirely away from green, probably because of its association with industry and asylum use.

heraldgeezer• 4 months ago

Why don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.

NetMageSCW3• 4 months ago

I had our maintenance department custom paint my beige desk black when I moved into my office.

markdown• 4 months ago

LOL I just bought a can of Dulux Sea Foam and one of Dulux Sea Foam Quarter yesterday

bronlund• 4 months ago

"Make a color theme for my terminal based on the Birren and DuPont master color safety code for the industrial plant industry."

dopatraman• 4 months ago

the Burt Reynolds poster

dubya• 4 months ago

Definitely Tom Selleck, aka Magnum PI.

skyberrys• 4 months ago

It's a color of green reminiscent of Tiffany blue, I mean both colors have the intent of the original color but at the same time there is a well washed feel to them. It's both unnatural and expected for the function of these colors.

microtherion• 4 months ago

I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.

ktokarev• 4 months ago

good one, UX matters indeed

abcde666777• 4 months ago

Funny - one of those things you don't really wonder about until someone points it out, but which proves pretty interesting once you're aware of it.

rodface• 4 months ago

Thank you for this share, because it rings close to another fascination of mine: the shade of green/teal that is the panel color of a great many Soviet aircraft cockpits. It's not the same as the shade of these industrial control panels[1], but it seems to me that they are in a family together. I would include the Windows 95 default background color in that same family; I find it relaxing enough that I still use it today. :)

[1]https://www.google.com/images?q=soviet%20aircraft%20cockpits

6bb32646d83d• 4 months ago

I was just visiting the cold war era nuclear ICBM control room bunker in Arizona and noticed this color everywhere. Timely article!

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54f84e69e4b021...

65103• 4 months ago

Between real jobs I once worked at a factory that paid the bare minimum wages, gave zero hour contracts and had the most unstable work hours I've ever seen. People who weren't needed showed up only to be send home, people who weren't planned for the day were suppose to be ready to jump in the entire day only to not be called for 3 weeks. They did shit like send one out of a team of 6 home just to see if 5 people could still do it. They would go out of their way to keep up for example for 2-4 hours but couldn't so someone else was called in for the last two hours.

I asked about the horizontal colored bars painted on the wall in the lunch room. It was the strangest selection of colors. Each bar about a fist width. It seemed someone went out of their way to invent the most boring bland colors possible.

They told me the factory had spend over 100 k on a color expert to increase productivity. Everyone who worked there for some time knew this.

I thought I'd observe the effect. Someone was released from the factory floor for 10 minutes because they by accident worked enough hours in a row to be entitled to a lunch break, in their own time of course.

They sat down at a table carefully positioned to look straight at the color bars. And then it started! I could see on their face their internal dialog as if talking with the hundred thousand euro color consultant. The sandwich went only half way up to their mouth and they slipped into a catatonic state looking at the colors.

It was facinating, I just had to see more. Turned out half the factory had this moment with this colored wall!

I didn't have to ask them what that expression was. I could look at the wall myself and the internal dialog stated immediately: How the fuck do they expect me to pay my bills if I have to wait by the phone all week but only get two 3 hour shifts? Why did they have to spend a hundred thousand on colors to make me more productive?

It was impossible to think anything else. It was almost a blessing to go back to the high speed conveyor belt. If I didn't see it myself I wouldn't believe color theory works in magical ways.

themafia• 4 months ago

The poster of Magnum P.I. really tied the place together dude.

aidenn0• 4 months ago

My mom had that exact poster in her home-office.

B1FF_PSUVM• 4 months ago

I designed a font called “Parts List”

... that just screams "green plastic stencil ruler"

beedle_mcdeedle• 4 months ago

I work as an automation technician for my province's electrical utility in Quebec Canada and all the hydro dams in my region still use this color for the control room paneling! I work in and around this color every day and it hasn't gotten old yet. The dams have been around for nearly a century and I've always appreciated their old industrial vibe.

paradox4602• 4 months ago

Growing up in Los Alamos, it's not just the lab that adhered to this color standard. Everything that had any vague connection to government, be it the post office, hospital, county council building, public access TV station, and schools were all colored in these various colors. And many things that weren't connected directly still used them, likely because they bought paint as surplus. One of a few elevators in town, part of a small shopping center, was sea foam, as were the lamp posts along downtown streets, and finally, the doors in the Posse Shack were also green, but that's likely because they were directly taken from the lab

pvab3• 4 months ago

Not even just Los Alamos. It was a very common color for schools and hospitals

paradox4602• 4 months ago

When we moved away, the new schools and such didn't have that color. Either the grey fad was just taking root at that time, or it hadn't penetrated the tri cities (home to the Hanford project) quite as well as it did Los Alamos

anthk2• 4 months ago

The old forniture in my Elementary school (the whole 90's) had that green tone until ~1998-1999.

userbinator• 4 months ago

To me, it's very evocative of mid-century industrial design. Detroit Diesel painted their engines a similar color too, although theirs is called "Alpine Green". ("Seafoam" brings to mind the engine additive too.)

vharuck• 4 months ago

In the fall of 1919, Faber Birren entered the Art Institute at the University of Chicago, only to drop out in the spring of 1921 to commit himself to self-education in color, as such a program didn’t exist.

The German word for color is "Farbe," which is an anagram of this guy's name. So I'm chalking one more point up to the universe being a simulation written by a cheeky developer.

ydj• 4 months ago

Funny, when I got tired of trying to find a nice desktop background I just started using a solid color of muted blue or green. I never read about this specific usage of colors before but I bet I saw something somewhere that clued me in on this color.

biofox• 4 months ago

Reminding me that early Windows versions used to have this colour as the default desktop colour -- and I remember seeing similar tones on Mac and Unix desktops in the 90s.

https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...

jnellis• 4 months ago

The 68 Ford Thunderbird (w/ suicide doors.) Mustangs also came in this color. https://imgur.com/a/BbzHVMn

fortran773• 4 months ago

Wait, what? Ending the war in Japan was "indefensible"?

cjohnson318• 4 months ago

I went to an old engineering school for grad school, all the older buildings had this color scheme.

xyzzy1232• 4 months ago

Great discussion on colour theory but I think it skips over the fact that chemistry and economics were also real constraints. Paints that don't fade easily, chemically inert, durable etc and can be produced in enormous volume are not that common. Practical stuff like, how easy does it catch fire, do solvents degrade it. Most important: is it CHEAP?

Also by 1944 there would have been a ready made supply chain due to demand from the navy, which would have picked it for similar reasons and consumed it in enormous volume.

I think, practically, control rooms are chrome oxide green (you get to add as much titanium as you like - thats cheap as dirt too EDIT: it would have been lead actually in the 40s) for much the same reason that barns are red.

justonceokay2• 4 months ago

I doubt the manhattan project had an issue funding paint

xyzzy1232• 4 months ago

Think for a minute about why they worked in shacks.

Also worth noting that Birren was a paid consultant for DuPont - the company that made the paint. From that perspective alone you would kinda expect he is gonna pick colours they already produce reliably at scale.

He also consulted for army, coast guard and navy so whatever colours you pick for hazard marking in an industrial setting have to be _vaguely_ congruent or you're going to cause accidents.

rippeltippel• 4 months ago

Many primary school classrooms in Italy had walls painted in that same colour, likely for the same reason.

ourmandave• 4 months ago

At the end...

PS: I have an old friend whose dad still works at the Uranium plant in Oak Ridge. I told him that I was surprised that almost all of the facilities had been torn down, and he just looked at me straight in the face and said, “Who said it’s actually gone?” Noted.

anymouse1234563• 4 months ago

Lots of old machinery from the era (Mills, Lathes, and such) also carried these colors.

Truly beautiful.

theodorethomas• 4 months ago

Apollo Command Module interior colour is similar, and gorgeous.

gorfian_robot• 4 months ago

I reported this to 99pi as an Article of Interest

NoSalt• 4 months ago

I was in the Air Force back in the late '80s, and SO MANY of the old equipment I worked with fit quite nicely into this color scheme. I can almost smell the old electronics now. It also reminds me of the AWESOME aesthetic that is the nixie tube.

mprovost• 4 months ago

It looks like almost the same colour of those David Clark headsets which seem to be ubiquitous in airplane cockpits or helicopters. It's even the background of their corporate logo.

bensonn• 4 months ago

It looked like Google Maps to me so I made a comparison. What is old is new again? https://imgur.com/a/b6HCx78

abetusk• 4 months ago

I'm surprised no one actually listed the hex colors (the one listed by ProllyInfamous isn't seafoam green?).

Wikipedia has it at #9FE2BF [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_green#Sea_foam_green

Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

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