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 9 hours 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."
SyzygyRhythm 9 hours 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).
mcfly_c-137 5 hours ago [-]
The monochromatic light emitted from sodium lamps is also close to the peak sensitivity of the human eye. Colours are not distinguishable, but contrast is much enhanced compared to “cooler” light sources.
*edit: but it’s the overwhelmingly larger lifespan (20-30k hrs) that led to the wide adoption as streetlights. And I guess, the same is true for the change to led today, because of less power consumption.
jacobolus 2 hours ago [-]
It's not especially close to the peak sensitivity of the human eye (in either bright or dim conditions), but that's entirely okay. The goal should be to not affect people's level of dark adaptation.
If you use shorter ("bluer") wavelengths, as happens with white LEDs which consist of a blue LED + phosphor, it causes people's eyes to become bright adapted and effective night vision is ruined, causing people to have much worse vision in the shadows.
Also, if you use bluer light, the lights themselves cause dramatically more glare in peripheral vision, because the shorter-wavelength-sensitive "S" cone cells and rod cells are mostly absent from the fovea (center of the retina), and prevalent in the outer areas of the retina. This is why LED headlamps on cars are so obnoxious for drivers going the opposite direction.
Also, the LEDs clobber people's circadian rhythms and are extremely disruptive to wildlife.
Finally, the light pollution caused by the LEDs is much worse for seeing the stars, which is maybe not as important as the other harms, but still kind of sad.
Chris2048 6 minutes ago [-]
> The goal should be to not affect people's level of dark adaptation.
Wouldn't that be red light? But night scenes illuminated in red light have the side effect of looking nightmarish..
eastbound 3 hours ago [-]
Sodium lamps were deemed dangerous for driving” because they made it difficult for drivers to distinguish shapes, since they were different from day shapes. A kid in bright 1980ies colors (Little Red Hood) would look black under those lights.
LED was presented as a sharp improvement because of the large spectrum of white light.
jacobolus 2 hours ago [-]
The sodium lamps are in fact safer for driving, because they preserve drivers' night vision, which improves visibility into the shadows, and because they cause less glare.
What they aren't good for is LED manufacturers' bottom line, and the lighting industry spent a lot of lobbying money to entice friendly politicians to heavily subsidize them with public infrastructure budgets, with those subsidies then misleadingly sold to the public as "efficient" and "environmentally friendly".
They're also not very good for reading the newspaper or doing critical color analysis. Thankfully such tasks do not need to be done at night in the middle of the street.
numpad0 1 hours ago [-]
Sodium (and mercury) vapor lamps may be the color they are due to physics, but you don't have to put Na or Hg in those tubes. I don't know but Li, K, Rb, Cs should, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba probably also work, but nobody make lamps with those elements.
7 hours ago [-]
salawat 7 hours ago [-]
...And the old Engineer was just saying that that was the area on the spectrum they aimed for, so they found a light that emitted in that wavelength that could be technically implemented and scaled.
Way better work than whoever it is handling this LED nonsense. Why we can't find a diode that we can use to simulate the old spectra would be a fun research project.
nine_k 6 hours ago [-]
We of course can make LEDs of more or less any color. The current white LEDs are high-power blue LEDs that are covered by various phosphors to give a mix of colors for "full spectrum" illumination. Different color temperatures are produced by different mixes of phosphors. This is pretty similar to how the traditional luminescent (mercury vapor-based) lamps worked.
But different phosphors have different efficiency and price. LED lamps were first introduced for interior lighting, where sun-like spectrum is welcome. Such LEDs were produced en masse and relatively cheaply. So street lighting naturally used them, because municipalities usually look for the cheapest viable option.
We likely could produce high-power narrow-spectrum orange LEDs if there was a large market for the economies of scale to kick in. You can buy deep orange LED lamps today (look for color temperature 1800K or 1600K, "amber"), but they are more expensive, because they are niche.
scubadude 5 hours ago [-]
Modern street lighting provides a way clearer view of the scene imo than the old sodium lighting. Maybe it's just brighter now.
jacobolus 1 hours ago [-]
Providing a day-like view of the scene should not be the primary goal of nighttime lighting.
LtWorf 5 hours ago [-]
It's about 100000x brighter and if your bedroom is next to a street lamp, good luck getting some sleep.
albumen 5 hours ago [-]
Blackout curtains.
6510 5 hours ago [-]
After they swapped out the lights at my job I couldn't sleep after night shifts. It's pitch dark but the biology thinks it was noon an hour ago.
linkjuice4all 9 hours 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.
The posted article seems like credulous commentary, though.
anthk 6 hours 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.
cucumber3732842 9 hours 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.
mikestorrent 7 hours ago [-]
IDK if you've noticed but we are all lighting our house with bulbs that use 1/10th the amount of electricity as incandescents did. I like the color spectrum of a real lightbulb better, too, but not enough to pay 10x in power. I make up for it by using all kinds of random bulbs all over the place so that the aggregate light in the room fills more of the spectrum than if I coordinated them all to be the same.
foobarian 4 hours ago [-]
The really awesome thing about the 1/10 power consumption is that the existing circuits/wiring/sockets now suddenly support 10x the light without burning down your house. I'm a sucker for well lit space and these lights are just heaven for me.
aliher1911 6 hours ago [-]
Did you try using high CRI LEDs with color remperature of 2700K–3000K? When I switched from halogen to LED I did just that and the difference is not noticeable, you'll have the same yellowish tint and very natural looking colours. Even with expensive bulbs, extra longevity covers for higher cost.
dotancohen 2 hours ago [-]
2700 is really cool. To the GP, if you're looking for something more like daylight but not noticeably yellow, try 3600k or thereabouts.
The actual temperature of the sun is over 5000k (yes, the k in lightbulb temperature corresponds to the Kelvin scale of temperature) but after being scattered by our atmosphere it appears cooler. And where did all that extra light go? It was scattered around, making the sky blue!
Forgeties79 2 hours ago [-]
3700-4500 is my range I like these days
dotancohen 2 hours ago [-]
If I could run different lighting after sunset, I'd run something high-CRI in your range during the day and a low-CRI 3000 after sunset.
As it is, I compromise.
jacobolus 1 hours ago [-]
There are LED lamps which have a "warm dim" feature so that the appear oranger as you reduce the brightness.
Spooky23 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is we went from a market that consisted of cheapo/good bulbs at various brightness levels to a market where Walmart and Home Depot have like 60 linear feet of bulbs.
There’s no standards and people are clueless and confused. There are awesome LEDs, but more often you see have harsh, terrible light.
nine_k 37 minutes ago [-]
Cluing in is really easy. Look for "CRI ≥ 90", or at least "full-spectrum" for the lamps that are easy on the eyes. Pick 2700K for softly lit spaces, 4000-4500K for brightly lit spaces.
cucumber3732842 7 hours ago [-]
>but we are all lighting our house with bulbs that use 1/10th the amount of electricity as incandescents did.
Yeah I know. I love it in my house.
On the industrial side, sodium vs LED is a much closer comparison generally than LED vs incandescent. LEDs kinda suck for high bay applications.
6510 4 hours ago [-]
Depending on where you live the heating might be nice.
In the US people use roughly 10 000 kwh per year.
Say we have a 40 watt bulb, say it burns on average 5 hours per day or 200 wh. In 365 days that would be 72 kwh which at 16 cents per kwh is $11.52 or 0.73% of the annual power consumption.
Say one uses 5 light bulbs. Something around $57.60. Say leds use only 25% of the power = $14.40 for $43.2 saved.
Well over 10 cents per day.
What are you going to spend your 10 cents on? lol
throwaway27448 7 hours ago [-]
How many life forms do we have to kill before cost savings aren't worth it?
Besides, we can have LEDs in better spectrums for under 1/5th the costs of incandescents. We just hired stingy motherfuckers and don't care about the repercussions of our decisions.
FpUser 4 hours 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
ErroneousBosh 6 hours ago [-]
This could do with a little better colour design, but let me just give you this to look at:
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.
prox 9 hours ago [-]
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Rantenki 9 hours 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 5 hours 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 hours 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.
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.
dylan604 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Prob because Go Away Green sounds way cooler than all of those and it’s not a user facing term anyways.
ryandrake 10 hours 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 9 hours 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.
SoftTalker 9 hours 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.
silisili 5 hours ago [-]
I get that argument, but as a counterpoint of one: Our last house we got so tired of the drabness, we used rich reds, golds, greens, and an even a bright orange in one room. It made the whole house feel so much more vibrant, it's hard to explain but it was just... pleasant to look at.
Anyways, the new owners tracked down my wife over some old mail, and during the conversation they thanked us for having painted it so vividly and said it was part of why they were drawn to it. They shared pics and they've done a -ton- of work, but the paint colors remain :)
Spooky23 4 hours ago [-]
2018 was peak chip and jojo. Every suburban chick was into grey and barn doors.
bobomonkey 9 hours ago [-]
Install the boring shit and use colored vinal wrap for fun. Good resale value and you can enjoy life.
ghaff 9 hours 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 3 hours 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.
jcalx 10 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.
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 56 minutes 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.
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 3 hours ago [-]
Not even just Los Alamos. It was a very common color for schools and hospitals
paradox460 3 hours 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
beedle_mcdeedle 4 hours 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.
rodface 5 hours 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. :)
>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.
somat 10 hours 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.
Loughla 10 hours 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 9 hours 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.
bityard 6 hours 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.
xethos 3 hours ago [-]
I'd also mention that black lasermarked white wire has marvelous contrast, even in the dim, covered in dust. Black lasermarked (or god help you, heatstamped) wire on damn near any other colour, like one finds in automotive, is distinctly worse.
Yellow would be manageable, but the wrong shade of red, purple, green, or blue (wihch, when seperating systems by colour, would inevitably get used) would be shitty to work on
NetMageSCW 4 hours 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.
SoftTalker 9 hours 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 6 hours ago [-]
Surely you mean F-15 right? (F-14 was exclusive to the Navy + Iran exports)
Loughla 4 hours ago [-]
Womp womp. Yes. F15. Somewhere my father is screaming.
zczc 7 hours ago [-]
They definitely knew, Soviet books on industrial design and architecture explicitly mention Birren [1]
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 hours ago [-]
The yellowish-green is the zinc chromate "passivation" coating to help prevent corrosion.
torginus 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
The reason for the green stairways was the vast surplus of the green paint (used for military equipment) post-WW2.
6bb32646d83d 5 hours ago [-]
I was just visiting the cold war era nuclear ICBM control room bunker in Arizona and noticed this color everywhere. Timely article!
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.
mgerdts 5 hours 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.
srmatto 8 hours 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 hours 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.
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.)
Terr_ 9 hours 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.
karlgkk 9 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
And here I assumed they sounded like red-tailed hawks!
karlgkk 7 hours 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.
bluedino 9 hours 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.
abcde666777 6 hours 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.
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.
6 hours ago [-]
kleton 9 hours ago [-]
Because chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment
mlacks 10 hours 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 9 hours 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)
ProllyInfamous 9 hours ago [-]
#81D8D0 club, represent!
Tiffany green is a Top10 /hn/topbar color for a reason.
buildbot 5 hours ago [-]
Mmmm it is quite nice
ProllyInfamous 1 hours ago [-]
You immediately know when you're logged out (because the topbar goes from soothing to bright orange).
8 hours ago [-]
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cmoski 9 hours ago [-]
Old school SCADA screens that I first saw had a similar green background.
microtherion 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.
bennyp101 8 hours 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.
pbohun 8 hours ago [-]
This makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.
10 hours ago [-]
bloak 8 hours ago [-]
Also hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.
emmelaich 4 hours 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.
anonu 9 hours ago [-]
Some of the old retired US aircraft carriers have their control rooms painted this color.
fortran77 31 minutes ago [-]
Wait, what? Ending the war in Japan was "indefensible"?
next_xibalba 8 hours ago [-]
> There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible
Sure. But this is not one those things.
fortran77 31 minutes ago [-]
I'm with you.
whostolemyhat 5 hours ago [-]
Did you read the next sentence?
NetMageSCW 4 hours ago [-]
That’s exactly the point. What “this” did you think was being referred to?
next_xibalba 2 hours 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.
pavel_lishin 9 hours ago [-]
> He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.
And? Did it?
vintermann 9 hours ago [-]
I suppose that's up to us to judge
markdown 8 hours ago [-]
LOL I just bought a can of Dulux Sea Foam and one of Dulux Sea Foam Quarter yesterday
heraldgeezer 8 hours ago [-]
Why don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.
NetMageSCW 4 hours ago [-]
I had our maintenance department custom paint my beige desk black when I moved into my office.
dopatraman 7 hours ago [-]
the Burt Reynolds poster
dubya 2 hours ago [-]
Definitely Tom Selleck, aka Magnum PI.
bronlund 7 hours ago [-]
"Make a color theme for my terminal based on the Birren and DuPont master color safety code for the industrial plant industry."
ChrisMarshallNY 10 hours ago [-]
That’s a fascinating story!
I’d never even heard of this guy.
emmelaich 4 hours ago [-]
Gal.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours 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…
carabiner 9 hours ago [-]
Su-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.
marginalia_nu 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah I was about to say similar pastel green colors crops up in a lot of Soviet control rooms too.
10 hours ago [-]
d--b 10 hours 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.
B1FF_PSUVM 4 hours ago [-]
> I designed a font called “Parts List”
... that just screams "green plastic stencil ruler"
ktokarev 6 hours ago [-]
good one, UX matters indeed
themafia 5 hours ago [-]
The poster of Magnum P.I. really tied the place together dude.
aidenn0 4 hours ago [-]
My mom had that exact poster in her home-office.
6510 5 hours 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.
leontloveless 8 hours ago [-]
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sayYayToLife 9 hours ago [-]
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themarogee 6 hours ago [-]
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cynicalsecurity 9 hours 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.
prewett 5 hours 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".)
amelius 8 hours 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.
Ylpertnodi 7 hours ago [-]
Why do doctors wear green?
mc2112 7 hours 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.
Theodores 8 hours 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.
huflungdung 10 hours ago [-]
Half arsed article. Expected much more detail
voxaai 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
NetMageSCW 4 hours ago [-]
Based on other comments Russian cockpits were based on the same theory and not independent.
CrazyStat 8 hours ago [-]
> Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
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).
*edit: but it’s the overwhelmingly larger lifespan (20-30k hrs) that led to the wide adoption as streetlights. And I guess, the same is true for the change to led today, because of less power consumption.
If you use shorter ("bluer") wavelengths, as happens with white LEDs which consist of a blue LED + phosphor, it causes people's eyes to become bright adapted and effective night vision is ruined, causing people to have much worse vision in the shadows.
Also, if you use bluer light, the lights themselves cause dramatically more glare in peripheral vision, because the shorter-wavelength-sensitive "S" cone cells and rod cells are mostly absent from the fovea (center of the retina), and prevalent in the outer areas of the retina. This is why LED headlamps on cars are so obnoxious for drivers going the opposite direction.
Also, the LEDs clobber people's circadian rhythms and are extremely disruptive to wildlife.
Finally, the light pollution caused by the LEDs is much worse for seeing the stars, which is maybe not as important as the other harms, but still kind of sad.
Wouldn't that be red light? But night scenes illuminated in red light have the side effect of looking nightmarish..
LED was presented as a sharp improvement because of the large spectrum of white light.
What they aren't good for is LED manufacturers' bottom line, and the lighting industry spent a lot of lobbying money to entice friendly politicians to heavily subsidize them with public infrastructure budgets, with those subsidies then misleadingly sold to the public as "efficient" and "environmentally friendly".
They're also not very good for reading the newspaper or doing critical color analysis. Thankfully such tasks do not need to be done at night in the middle of the street.
Way better work than whoever it is handling this LED nonsense. Why we can't find a diode that we can use to simulate the old spectra would be a fun research project.
But different phosphors have different efficiency and price. LED lamps were first introduced for interior lighting, where sun-like spectrum is welcome. Such LEDs were produced en masse and relatively cheaply. So street lighting naturally used them, because municipalities usually look for the cheapest viable option.
We likely could produce high-power narrow-spectrum orange LEDs if there was a large market for the economies of scale to kick in. You can buy deep orange LED lamps today (look for color temperature 1800K or 1600K, "amber"), but they are more expensive, because they are niche.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonlight_tower
[1] https://sigostreetlight.com/blogs/common-quality-problems-in...
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.
The actual temperature of the sun is over 5000k (yes, the k in lightbulb temperature corresponds to the Kelvin scale of temperature) but after being scattered by our atmosphere it appears cooler. And where did all that extra light go? It was scattered around, making the sky blue!
As it is, I compromise.
There’s no standards and people are clueless and confused. There are awesome LEDs, but more often you see have harsh, terrible light.
Yeah I know. I love it in my house.
On the industrial side, sodium vs LED is a much closer comparison generally than LED vs incandescent. LEDs kinda suck for high bay applications.
In the US people use roughly 10 000 kwh per year.
Say we have a 40 watt bulb, say it burns on average 5 hours per day or 200 wh. In 365 days that would be 72 kwh which at 16 cents per kwh is $11.52 or 0.73% of the annual power consumption.
Say one uses 5 light bulbs. Something around $57.60. Say leds use only 25% of the power = $14.40 for $43.2 saved.
Well over 10 cents per day.
What are you going to spend your 10 cents on? lol
Besides, we can have LEDs in better spectrums for under 1/5th the costs of incandescents. We just hired stingy motherfuckers and don't care about the repercussions of our decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyways, the new owners tracked down my wife over some old mail, and during the conversation they thanked us for having painted it so vividly and said it was part of why they were drawn to it. They shared pics and they've done a -ton- of work, but the paint colors remain :)
Sad to see how many houses are painted gray or beige in SF now. We are going to paint ours purple in protest.
[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...
[1]https://www.google.com/images?q=soviet%20aircraft%20cockpits
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yellow would be manageable, but the wrong shade of red, purple, green, or blue (wihch, when seperating systems by colour, would inevitably get used) would be shitty to work on
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="биррен"+зеленый&udm=36&tbs=... (search for Russian for "Birren"+green in 20th century books)
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.
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54f84e69e4b021...
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.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/1197961103/pantone-colors-law...
Either because of unconscious choice, or because some designer theorized that people would be biologically primed to prefer it.
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.
It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.
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.
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
After a little over a decade of service, no other color infuriates me more
I think hospitals have moved entirely away from green, probably because of its association with industry and asylum use.
Sure. But this is not one those things.
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.
And? Did it?
I’d never even heard of this guy.
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…
... that just screams "green plastic stencil ruler"
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.
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.
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".)
Maybe it even works better with the color of a clear blue sky above it.
Anyway, it's intuitive and not rocket science.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html