- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Reminds me of Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
by ryandrake
2 subcomments
- 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.
- Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.
[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- Also hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.
- 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 makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.
by dogscatstrees
1 subcomments
- 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.
by heraldgeezer
0 subcomment
- Why don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.
- Because chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment
- 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.
by ProllyInfamous
0 subcomment
#81D8D0 club, represent!
Tiffany green is a Top10 /hn/topbar color for a reason.
- 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
- 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.
by pavel_lishin
1 subcomments
- > He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.
And? Did it?
by carabiner
1 subcomments
- Su-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.
by next_xibalba
0 subcomment
- > There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible
Sure. But this is not one those things.
by ChrisMarshallNY
0 subcomment
- 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.
by leontloveless
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by sayYayToLife
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by cynicalsecurity
2 subcomments
- 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.
by huflungdung
0 subcomment
- Half arsed article. Expected much more detail
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