alt Hacker NewsWhy so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
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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.
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
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 Go Away Green - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Away_Green
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.
Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.
[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
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. :)
[1]https://www.google.com/images?q=soviet%20aircraft%20cockpits
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 was just visiting the cold war era nuclear ICBM control room bunker in Arizona and noticed this color everywhere. Timely article!
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54f84e69e4b021...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Because chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment
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
#81D8D0 club, represent!
I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.
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.
This makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.
Also hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.
> There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible
Sure. But this is not one those things.
Some of the old retired US aircraft carriers have their control rooms painted this color.
Old school SCADA screens that I first saw had a similar green background.
good one, UX matters indeed
> He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.
And? Did it?
LOL I just bought a can of Dulux Sea Foam and one of Dulux Sea Foam Quarter yesterday
the Burt Reynolds poster
Why don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.
"Make a color theme for my terminal based on the Birren and DuPont master color safety code for the industrial plant industry."
> I designed a font called “Parts List”
... that just screams "green plastic stencil ruler"
That’s a fascinating story!
I’d never even heard of this guy.
Su-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.
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.
The poster of Magnum P.I. really tied the place together dude.
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.
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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.
Half arsed article. Expected much more detail
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.
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.