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Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

bethmathews.substack.com

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Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#21

Post by mikepurvis »

ryandrake wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#22

Post by saltcured »

Loughla wrote: post #11
somat wrote: post #7

I wonder if the designers of cold war soviet planes read the same color theory because their cockpits are always a very particular indescribable shade of green. There were also very specific colors for subsystems, yellow for fuel, purple for hydraulics etc. Much more than the contemporary US designs.

My father was a mechanic and crew chief working on F-14's during his time in the air force. His two takeaways from his service were: 1. No one should ever join the military for any reason ever forever, and 2. Somebody needs to color code literally anything. He talked about how the wiring schematics were a maze, made worse by using only non-labeled gray and black wires with connections and mounts that were the same co…

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.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#23

Post by ghaff »

ryandrake wrote: post #13

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…

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.

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#25

Post by vscode-rest »

dylan604 wrote: post #19
ortusdux wrote: post #3

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

Go Away reads to me as a command to the viewer to go away rather than the intended "we want the object to go away from the viewer's thoughts". If they were okay with a phrase like Go Away Green, why not something like Hidden View Green, Irrelevant Green, Don't Look Here Green, etc. Some PR department would have a field day

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

Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)

#29

Post by roughly »

jscheel wrote: post #14

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 ca…

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."
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