I reported this to 99pi as an Article of Interest
Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
201–210 of 218 posts
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#202It'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…
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.
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#203It'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…
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.
Reminds me of "Mr. Pine's Purple House"
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#204Reminds me of Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
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!)"
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#205I 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.
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#206It 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.
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#207#81D8D0 club, represent! Tiffany green is a Top10 /hn/topbar color for a reason .
what, can I change the topbar color?
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).
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#208It looked like Google Maps to me so I made a comparison. What is old is new again? https://imgur.com/a/b6HCx78
Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#209Re: Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
#210While 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 chemi…
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.
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.