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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)

#41

Post by csours »

jaggederest wrote: post #36
karlgkk wrote: post #32

> 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 b…

We took a trip to Alaska via RV, and were parked at a roadside. I got up at 11:30pm at "night" (broad daylight) to use the restroom and was so annoyed by the seagulls I went outside to yell at them. It was eagles fighting over a salmon. They genuinely do sound and act exactly like seagulls.

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

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

#42

Post by linkjuice4all »

roughly wrote: post #29
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…

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...

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

#44

Post by cucumber3732842 »

roughly wrote: post #29
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…

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.

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

#46

Post by prox »

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…

[dead]

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

#47

Post by SyzygyRhythm »

roughly wrote: post #29
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…

> 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).

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

#49

Post by srmatto »

dogscatstrees wrote: post #9

This article is a gem, thank you. Now off to Sherwin-Williams to see what the equivalent color names are. I wonder if there are matching formula.

Would be cool to get an original copy of "Colors for Interiors: Historical and Modern by Faber Birren" and create color matches assuming it's not faded too much. I wonder if he created some kind of pigmentation ratio (or however paint coloring works) that he shared somewhere?
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