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.
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."
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).
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.
There are 2 kinds of sodium lamps, low-pressure and high-pressure.
The low-pressure lamps emit monochromatic light and they have not only the advantage of long life but they are also the only other source of light that matches the energy efficiency of converting electrical energy to light of the LED lamps.
So replacing low-pressure lamps with LED lamps does not produce any significant economic effects, it was justified only by the supposed advantage of enabling color vision.
However in many places high-pressure sodium lamps have been preferred, which have a wider spectrum, so they allow some very poor color discrimination. The high-pressure lamps have a lower efficiency than LED lamps, so replacing them was justified by energy savings.
Outdoors at night, I prefer the monochromatic low-pressure sodium lamps, but sadly LED lamps have replaced them in most places.
In my area and esp. in the countryside they have green led lighting on various roads as an innovation, with the reasoning that is both least disturbing to wildlife, and best for human vision to see sharply. The light color takes some getting used to, but I am quite a fan of it. Esp. when cycling at home at night through the fields it makes things seem extra serene and peaceful.
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.
> It's not especially close to the peak sensitivity
The sensitivity at sodium light is above 75% of the peak human vision (photopic) sensitivity.
This is a very small difference in light sensitivity. For example in the case of many sources of red light or blue light the sensitivity can be 5 to 10 times lower than the peak sensitivity.
Moreover, a perfect source of white light cannot achieve a better sensitivity than around 37%, i.e. less than half of the efficiency of an ideal source of monochromatic light at the sodium emission line.
Therefore the fact that currently LED lamps and low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency is caused by the LED lamps having a higher photonic efficiency and a lower threshold voltage (caused by a P-N junction voltage instead of the ionization potential of sodium), which compensate the disadvantage of using white light. A monochromatic LED lamp with the same color as the sodium lamps could have an energy efficiency at least double over the white LED lamps.
Red light would be even better for affecting the dark adaptation, but it has other disadvantages, like much worse energetic efficiency and lower visual resolution.
Yellow light a.k.a. amber light around the sodium emission line is a good compromise between energy efficiency, visual resolution and dark adaptation.
That's not necessarily a downside for traffic safety, though. Though I imagine someone must have studied the effects of various wavelengths on drivers...
The power savings are minor btweeen LED and low presssure sodium lamps. The LED streetlights emit light along the full spectrum, the sodium lamps only at 589 nm. The LEDs are more controllable so smart dimming ( when there are no cars) is a perceived advantage.
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.
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.
That would make sense. Otherwise I have no idea how people wouldn't have noticed how much more difficult it makes seeing anything outside of the sharp cutoff of the light cone (or, of course, for the person being dazzled on the other side).
Two things can be true. And often that's precisely when we lose out with modern engineering that is much more single-minded.
> Their only advantage...
How are you coming to this conclusion?! Their warmer has very meaningful effects on processing, attention and other visual effects as is the point of the discussion in the first place. It's not clear what makes you so sure that color differentiation is essential and the other effects are irrelevant.
No I absolutely don't know what matters. But it seems neither do you.
The lamps that use alkaline metal vapor instead of a noble gas have better energy efficiency, because of a lower ionization potential, which leads to a lower voltage drop on the lamp. Therefore they have been preferred for lighting instead of neon lamps and the like.
Among alkaline metals, sodium is the cheapest, so it was a logical choice.
However, the fact that it produces light of a suitable color was a happy coincidence. If sodium had produced violet light, like potassium, and potassium had produced yellow light, potassium would have been chosen for lamps.
So among the criteria for choosing sodium for lamps, the color of the light was as important as cost, ionization potential and vapor pressure.
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.
There are 4 important properties for the substance used in a gas-discharge lamp.
1. For a sufficient gas pressure in the lamp, the substance must be either a gas or a metal with low boiling temperature, so that it will be vaporized by an electrical discharge.
2. The gas must not react chemically with the enclosure and with the electrodes, which prevents the use of most gases except noble gases and metallic vapors. Except for noble gases and metallic vapors, the lamps using other substances must not have electrodes, so they need a more complex and less efficient electronic system for producing a high-frequency AC discharge, e.g. using a magnetron from microwave ovens.
3. The ionization potential must be low for a good energy efficiency. Alkaline metals have low ionization potentials and low boiling temperatures, so they are better than noble gases and other metals.
4. The color of the light must be one where the sensitivity and the visual acuity are high. This narrows the choice to yellow light, i.e. to sodium, between the alkaline metals.
...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.
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.
> Different color temperatures are produced by different mixes of phosphors.
We can make LED light appear to be any given colour by mixing multiple LEDs. But mixed colour isn't the same as pure colour, made from a single spectra of light. Nor is it the same as true broad spectrum light - like we get from black-body radiation like the sun, or a tungsten bulb.
Its hard to tell the difference just by looking at a light. But different kinds of lights - even lights which look the same colour - will change what objects actually look like. And they probably have different effects on our sleep cycle and our low light vision. I was in a room once lit only by sodium vapour lights. The lights were yellow, but everything in the room (including me) appeared to be in greyscale. It was uncanny.
This is part of the reason why LED lights are still looked down on by a lot of old school photographers and film makers. Skin doesn't look as good under cheap LED lights.
For light with a narrow spectrum, it is possible to make LEDs that emit that light with high-efficiency, for any color inside 2 ranges, one from near infrared to yellow (corresponding to semiconductor phosphides and arsenides) and one from blue to near ultraviolet (corresponding to semiconductor nitrides).
Only green LEDs have worse efficiency, because they must be made with semiconductors for which optimum efficiency is attained at either lower or higher light frequencies.
Lamps using high-efficiency amber LEDs with about the same color with sodium lamps could be made at an energetic efficiency at least double to that of white LED lamps.
The double factor comes from the visual sensitivity being double for the light at sodium color than for ideal white light.
In reality the energetic efficiency of such LED lamps should be more than double, because they do not have losses caused by conversion through fluorescence.
seafoam green choice was also influenced by eye rest studies... since our eyes are most sensitive to middle wavelengths. just keep the room dimmer without losing detail. It reduces fatigue for operators on long shifts.
When I was an medical intern back in the day and worked 24 hour shifts every third day, I bought a roll of thick black vinyl and taped it to the window frame. 0.0 light got through.
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.
Another effect observed with LED street lights, especially in my area, is that many have shifted from white light to purple as a widespread manufacturing flaw causes their phosphor coating to fail.
The purple lights evoke a vaporwave/synthwave aesthetic like I'm in a bad 80s scifi movie. Unintentionally appropriate given the general state of things.
I wouldn’t change it for the world. I grew up in Minneapolis and moved to Seattle, so I went in a single night from sodium lights everywhere in a 500 mile radius to LED. It feels safer (subjective), more pleasant to perform tasks in, and less depressing. I should note I care 0% what the animals think of the whole affair.
This is especially important at high latitudes where for months of the year the street lights provide more illumination than the sun for most working people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many complain about this, because they have been fooled into buying low-quality lamps, with bad cooling or bad electronic components.
I have many Philips LED lamps bought some 10 to 15 years ago, which were put in Edison sockets for incandescent lamps, and none of them has become defective during all these years.
However, even at that time, it was not their cheapest model, but one that was claimed to be long-life and I believe that later they have discontinued that model in favor of cheaper lamps.
I have no idea which vendor of LED lamps might sell good LED lamps today, because I never had to search for replacements. I assume that good LED lamps must still be available, but one must not impulse buy them, but one must check carefully the specifications of the lamps and the credibility of the vendor, before making a purchase decision.
I do not like 2700 K to 3000 K lamps, which are obviously yellowish and regardless how high their CRI may be they distort the colors of clothes or any other objects.
I also do not like the bluish cheap 6500 K lamps.
I consider optimum the 4000 K lamps. This appear white with only a very-slightly yellowish hue, which allows the perception of the natural colors of most objects, but it still provides a warmer sensation than a strictly neutral white color (i.e. one around 5500 K).
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!
Thanks, that's great to know! However, I also had to remove the high-CRI lights from some lamps because I found that they disturb my sleep if I have them on in the hours before bedtime.
I live in a 240-volt country, though, and I've never seen a dimmer switch here.
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.
For indoor lighting, LED lamps are indeed the right solution.
I have also been using for more than a decade 13 W LED lamps that produce the same luminous flux as the 100-W incandescent lamps or the 23-W compact fluorescent lamps used in the past.
However, the requirements for an outdoor night lamp are very different. Low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency and lifetime as LED lamps, so those are not arguments for replacing them. The only thing that matters is whether you prefer yellow light or white light in a night environment. I definitely prefer yellow light, for reasons already mentioned by others, i.e. much less interference with night vision, sky light, nocturnal animals, or with my street-directed windows at home.
If energy efficiency would really matter, one could produce monochromatic amber LED lamps with efficiencies at least double over the current white LED lamps.
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.
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.
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.
I question the cost/energy savings. Seems to me for the most part any efficiency gains are being spent on making everything 5x as bright and expansive.
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.
I hate incandescents and am glad they're gone. People chronically under light their homes at the best of times.
My whole house is neutral white LEDs except the bathrooms where we go to cool white to make it easier to clean and be sure it's clean (even if it's not spotless, there's a huge psychological benefit to not feeling like dim light is masking even more grime).
Oddly enough I'm otherwise pretty light sensitive - my current office at work has been a nightmare of trying to manage glare from badly places overheads and windows.
Going from 500w for my living room to 80w also helps a lot (and way more light and a lot less heat).
High-quality white LED lamps are indeed optimal for indoor lighting.
That does not make them the best choice for outdoor night lighting.
The replacement of the outdoor lighting appears to have been motivated in most cases by the desire to divert taxpayer funds towards the private companies selling such lamps, instead of by any technical reasons.
Those LED people marketed themselves out of a job, then. I repaced one (1) broken light bulb over the past 10 years, as opposed to 5 a year before switching to LEDs.
Ha. I didn't realize until I checked the comments that I worked with Beth in Nashville too! Not sure what that says about how I consume content these days... but she's delightful.
Two of my favorite classes in college were Color Studies and Typography. As a long time back end engineer, I would encourage anyone unfamiliar to spend at least a little bit of time looking into both. If you're at all intrigued, treat yourself to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St.... It will forever change how you look at text (hopefully for the better!).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great discussion on colour theory but I think it skips over the fact that chemistry and economics were also real constraints. Paints that don't fade easily, chemically inert, durable etc and can be produced in enormous volume are not that common. Practical stuff like, how easy does it catch fire, do solvents degrade it. Most important: is it CHEAP?
Also by 1944 there would have been a ready made supply chain due to demand from the navy, which would have picked it for similar reasons and consumed it in enormous volume.
I think, practically, control rooms are chrome oxide green (you get to add as much titanium as you like - thats cheap as dirt too EDIT: it would have been lead actually in the 40s) for much the same reason that barns are red.
Think for a minute about why they worked in shacks.
Also worth noting that Birren was a paid consultant for DuPont - the company that made the paint. From that perspective alone you would kinda expect he is gonna pick colours they already produce reliably at scale.
He also consulted for army, coast guard and navy so whatever colours you pick for hazard marking in an industrial setting have to be _vaguely_ congruent or you're going to cause accidents.
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. :)
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
The purpose stated in the article in the mind of Birren was to reduce eye strain. I don't think it's so much that humans "prefer" it as such, more that we're very well adapted to work in environments with lots of it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
It 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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.)
PS: I have an old friend whose dad still works at the Uranium plant in Oak Ridge. I told him that I was surprised that almost all of the facilities had been torn down, and he just looked at me straight in the face and said, “Who said it’s actually gone?” Noted.
> "The Manhattan Project created the nuclear bomb that caused extreme devastation in Japan and ended the war. There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible."
That's one hell of a non-sequitur. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what she thinks it means. "The US ended the worst war in human history. Indefensible!"
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.
I'm not sure how much it really matters but it is mildly annoying when people's brains just shut off when they hear atomic/nuclear.
It's perfectly reasonable to make an argument that they were "not needed" in terms of ending ww2, it's much, much more difficult to argue that fewer people would have died if they weren't used.
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.
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.
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".)
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.
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.
Uh, I think they didn't use WW2 surplus anything when they build Oak Ridge and Hanford before the end of WW2. I also think given that those two plants were key bits of the Manhattan Project that they didn't cheap out on anything. And the color dude was in fact hired by DuPont who built those two plants and adopted his theories because they increased measured factory productivity and safety. Lastly the OG dude in the article was not an engineer. In fact he was an art school dropout who was very interested in color. So no on the no.
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.
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."
> 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).
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.
There are 2 kinds of sodium lamps, low-pressure and high-pressure.
The low-pressure lamps emit monochromatic light and they have not only the advantage of long life but they are also the only other source of light that matches the energy efficiency of converting electrical energy to light of the LED lamps.
So replacing low-pressure lamps with LED lamps does not produce any significant economic effects, it was justified only by the supposed advantage of enabling color vision.
However in many places high-pressure sodium lamps have been preferred, which have a wider spectrum, so they allow some very poor color discrimination. The high-pressure lamps have a lower efficiency than LED lamps, so replacing them was justified by energy savings.
Outdoors at night, I prefer the monochromatic low-pressure sodium lamps, but sadly LED lamps have replaced them in most places.
In my area and esp. in the countryside they have green led lighting on various roads as an innovation, with the reasoning that is both least disturbing to wildlife, and best for human vision to see sharply. The light color takes some getting used to, but I am quite a fan of it. Esp. when cycling at home at night through the fields it makes things seem extra serene and peaceful.
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.
> It's not especially close to the peak sensitivity
The sensitivity at sodium light is above 75% of the peak human vision (photopic) sensitivity.
This is a very small difference in light sensitivity. For example in the case of many sources of red light or blue light the sensitivity can be 5 to 10 times lower than the peak sensitivity.
Moreover, a perfect source of white light cannot achieve a better sensitivity than around 37%, i.e. less than half of the efficiency of an ideal source of monochromatic light at the sodium emission line.
Therefore the fact that currently LED lamps and low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency is caused by the LED lamps having a higher photonic efficiency and a lower threshold voltage (caused by a P-N junction voltage instead of the ionization potential of sodium), which compensate the disadvantage of using white light. A monochromatic LED lamp with the same color as the sodium lamps could have an energy efficiency at least double over the white LED lamps.
> 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..
Red light would be even better for affecting the dark adaptation, but it has other disadvantages, like much worse energetic efficiency and lower visual resolution.
Yellow light a.k.a. amber light around the sodium emission line is a good compromise between energy efficiency, visual resolution and dark adaptation.
That's not necessarily a downside for traffic safety, though. Though I imagine someone must have studied the effects of various wavelengths on drivers...
Advertisers definitely did - there's (some) money in billboards, but only as long as you don't kill your prospective customers.
The power savings are minor btweeen LED and low presssure sodium lamps. The LED streetlights emit light along the full spectrum, the sodium lamps only at 589 nm. The LEDs are more controllable so smart dimming ( when there are no cars) is a perceived advantage.
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.
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.
That would make sense. Otherwise I have no idea how people wouldn't have noticed how much more difficult it makes seeing anything outside of the sharp cutoff of the light cone (or, of course, for the person being dazzled on the other side).
Two things can be true. And often that's precisely when we lose out with modern engineering that is much more single-minded.
> Their only advantage...
How are you coming to this conclusion?! Their warmer has very meaningful effects on processing, attention and other visual effects as is the point of the discussion in the first place. It's not clear what makes you so sure that color differentiation is essential and the other effects are irrelevant.
No I absolutely don't know what matters. But it seems neither do you.
The lamps that use alkaline metal vapor instead of a noble gas have better energy efficiency, because of a lower ionization potential, which leads to a lower voltage drop on the lamp. Therefore they have been preferred for lighting instead of neon lamps and the like.
Among alkaline metals, sodium is the cheapest, so it was a logical choice.
However, the fact that it produces light of a suitable color was a happy coincidence. If sodium had produced violet light, like potassium, and potassium had produced yellow light, potassium would have been chosen for lamps.
So among the criteria for choosing sodium for lamps, the color of the light was as important as cost, ionization potential and vapor pressure.
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.
There are 4 important properties for the substance used in a gas-discharge lamp.
1. For a sufficient gas pressure in the lamp, the substance must be either a gas or a metal with low boiling temperature, so that it will be vaporized by an electrical discharge.
2. The gas must not react chemically with the enclosure and with the electrodes, which prevents the use of most gases except noble gases and metallic vapors. Except for noble gases and metallic vapors, the lamps using other substances must not have electrodes, so they need a more complex and less efficient electronic system for producing a high-frequency AC discharge, e.g. using a magnetron from microwave ovens.
3. The ionization potential must be low for a good energy efficiency. Alkaline metals have low ionization potentials and low boiling temperatures, so they are better than noble gases and other metals.
4. The color of the light must be one where the sensitivity and the visual acuity are high. This narrows the choice to yellow light, i.e. to sodium, between the alkaline metals.
...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.
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.
> Different color temperatures are produced by different mixes of phosphors.
We can make LED light appear to be any given colour by mixing multiple LEDs. But mixed colour isn't the same as pure colour, made from a single spectra of light. Nor is it the same as true broad spectrum light - like we get from black-body radiation like the sun, or a tungsten bulb.
Its hard to tell the difference just by looking at a light. But different kinds of lights - even lights which look the same colour - will change what objects actually look like. And they probably have different effects on our sleep cycle and our low light vision. I was in a room once lit only by sodium vapour lights. The lights were yellow, but everything in the room (including me) appeared to be in greyscale. It was uncanny.
This is part of the reason why LED lights are still looked down on by a lot of old school photographers and film makers. Skin doesn't look as good under cheap LED lights.
For light with a narrow spectrum, it is possible to make LEDs that emit that light with high-efficiency, for any color inside 2 ranges, one from near infrared to yellow (corresponding to semiconductor phosphides and arsenides) and one from blue to near ultraviolet (corresponding to semiconductor nitrides).
Only green LEDs have worse efficiency, because they must be made with semiconductors for which optimum efficiency is attained at either lower or higher light frequencies.
Lamps using high-efficiency amber LEDs with about the same color with sodium lamps could be made at an energetic efficiency at least double to that of white LED lamps.
The double factor comes from the visual sensitivity being double for the light at sodium color than for ideal white light.
In reality the energetic efficiency of such LED lamps should be more than double, because they do not have losses caused by conversion through fluorescence.
seafoam green choice was also influenced by eye rest studies... since our eyes are most sensitive to middle wavelengths. just keep the room dimmer without losing detail. It reduces fatigue for operators on long shifts.
Modern street lighting provides a way clearer view of the scene imo than the old sodium lighting. Maybe it's just brighter now.
Providing a day-like view of the scene should not be the primary goal of nighttime lighting.
It's about 100000x brighter and if your bedroom is next to a street lamp, good luck getting some sleep.
Blackout curtains.
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.
Inadequate.
When I was an medical intern back in the day and worked 24 hour shifts every third day, I bought a roll of thick black vinyl and taped it to the window frame. 0.0 light got through.
But i want sunlight in the morning?
https://shop.delos.com/products/philips-wake-up-light-hf3650...
"i want a wife" "here's a blow up doll. Totally the same thing"
Best we can do in this economy.
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...
Another effect observed with LED street lights, especially in my area, is that many have shifted from white light to purple as a widespread manufacturing flaw causes their phosphor coating to fail.
The purple lights evoke a vaporwave/synthwave aesthetic like I'm in a bad 80s scifi movie. Unintentionally appropriate given the general state of things.
I wouldn’t change it for the world. I grew up in Minneapolis and moved to Seattle, so I went in a single night from sodium lights everywhere in a 500 mile radius to LED. It feels safer (subjective), more pleasant to perform tasks in, and less depressing. I should note I care 0% what the animals think of the whole affair.
This is especially important at high latitudes where for months of the year the street lights provide more illumination than the sun for most working people.
The posted article seems like credulous commentary, though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, or just living in a place where the power is so bad, it causes premature failures.
The claimed extra longevity of LED bulbs has not materialized for me.
They seem to fail at roughly the same frequency that incandescent bulbs did in my home, which makes them about 10x to 15x more expensive.
Many complain about this, because they have been fooled into buying low-quality lamps, with bad cooling or bad electronic components.
I have many Philips LED lamps bought some 10 to 15 years ago, which were put in Edison sockets for incandescent lamps, and none of them has become defective during all these years.
However, even at that time, it was not their cheapest model, but one that was claimed to be long-life and I believe that later they have discontinued that model in favor of cheaper lamps.
I have no idea which vendor of LED lamps might sell good LED lamps today, because I never had to search for replacements. I assume that good LED lamps must still be available, but one must not impulse buy them, but one must check carefully the specifications of the lamps and the credibility of the vendor, before making a purchase decision.
I do not like 2700 K to 3000 K lamps, which are obviously yellowish and regardless how high their CRI may be they distort the colors of clothes or any other objects.
I also do not like the bluish cheap 6500 K lamps.
I consider optimum the 4000 K lamps. This appear white with only a very-slightly yellowish hue, which allows the perception of the natural colors of most objects, but it still provides a warmer sensation than a strictly neutral white color (i.e. one around 5500 K).
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!
The color of the solar light depends on the proportion of yellowish direct solar light and bluish sky light that fall on an object.
When the sky is covered by clouds, which mix the direct Sun light and the sky light, you get a color much closer to the true color of the Sun.
Personally I find 2700k-rated LED to not even be low-k enough to match incandescent.
3700-4500 is my range I like these days
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.
There are LED lamps which have a "warm dim" feature so that the appear oranger as you reduce the brightness.
Thanks, that's great to know! However, I also had to remove the high-CRI lights from some lamps because I found that they disturb my sleep if I have them on in the hours before bedtime.
I live in a 240-volt country, though, and I've never seen a dimmer switch here.
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.
For indoor lighting, LED lamps are indeed the right solution.
I have also been using for more than a decade 13 W LED lamps that produce the same luminous flux as the 100-W incandescent lamps or the 23-W compact fluorescent lamps used in the past.
However, the requirements for an outdoor night lamp are very different. Low-pressure sodium lamps have about the same energy efficiency and lifetime as LED lamps, so those are not arguments for replacing them. The only thing that matters is whether you prefer yellow light or white light in a night environment. I definitely prefer yellow light, for reasons already mentioned by others, i.e. much less interference with night vision, sky light, nocturnal animals, or with my street-directed windows at home.
If energy efficiency would really matter, one could produce monochromatic amber LED lamps with efficiencies at least double over the current white LED lamps.
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.
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.
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.
I question the cost/energy savings. Seems to me for the most part any efficiency gains are being spent on making everything 5x as bright and expansive.
>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.
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
I hate incandescents and am glad they're gone. People chronically under light their homes at the best of times.
My whole house is neutral white LEDs except the bathrooms where we go to cool white to make it easier to clean and be sure it's clean (even if it's not spotless, there's a huge psychological benefit to not feeling like dim light is masking even more grime).
Oddly enough I'm otherwise pretty light sensitive - my current office at work has been a nightmare of trying to manage glare from badly places overheads and windows.
Going from 500w for my living room to 80w also helps a lot (and way more light and a lot less heat).
High-quality white LED lamps are indeed optimal for indoor lighting.
That does not make them the best choice for outdoor night lighting.
The replacement of the outdoor lighting appears to have been motivated in most cases by the desire to divert taxpayer funds towards the private companies selling such lamps, instead of by any technical reasons.
Cool white lights are tacky, offensive to the senses, and disruptive to circadian rhythms at night.
Those LED people marketed themselves out of a job, then. I repaced one (1) broken light bulb over the past 10 years, as opposed to 5 a year before switching to LEDs.
Ha. I didn't realize until I checked the comments that I worked with Beth in Nashville too! Not sure what that says about how I consume content these days... but she's delightful.
Two of my favorite classes in college were Color Studies and Typography. As a long time back end engineer, I would encourage anyone unfamiliar to spend at least a little bit of time looking into both. If you're at all intrigued, treat yourself to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St.... It will forever change how you look at text (hopefully for the better!).
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
This could do with a little better colour design, but let me just give you this to look at:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reminds 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!)"
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.
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.
And alliteration for extra cool.
"Move Along Green"
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
2018 was peak chip and jojo. Every suburban chick was into grey and barn doors.
Install the boring shit and use colored vinal wrap for fun. Good resale value and you can enjoy life.
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.
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.
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"
Reminds me of turquoise cockpits [0], another workspace where visual fatigue considerations are important.
[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...
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
Not even just Los Alamos. It was a very common color for schools and hospitals
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
The old forniture in my Elementary school (the whole 90's) had that green tone until ~1998-1999.
I 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Surely you mean F-15 right? (F-14 was exclusive to the Navy + Iran exports)
Womp womp. Yes. F15. Somewhere my father is screaming.
They definitely knew, Soviet books on industrial design and architecture explicitly mention Birren [1]
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q="биррен"+зеленый&udm=36&tbs=... (search for Russian for "Birren"+green in 20th century books)
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.
The yellowish-green is the zinc chromate "passivation" coating to help prevent corrosion.
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.
The reason for the green stairways was the vast surplus of the green paint (used for military equipment) post-WW2.
Great discussion on colour theory but I think it skips over the fact that chemistry and economics were also real constraints. Paints that don't fade easily, chemically inert, durable etc and can be produced in enormous volume are not that common. Practical stuff like, how easy does it catch fire, do solvents degrade it. Most important: is it CHEAP?
Also by 1944 there would have been a ready made supply chain due to demand from the navy, which would have picked it for similar reasons and consumed it in enormous volume.
I think, practically, control rooms are chrome oxide green (you get to add as much titanium as you like - thats cheap as dirt too EDIT: it would have been lead actually in the 40s) for much the same reason that barns are red.
I doubt the manhattan project had an issue funding paint
Think for a minute about why they worked in shacks.
Also worth noting that Birren was a paid consultant for DuPont - the company that made the paint. From that perspective alone you would kinda expect he is gonna pick colours they already produce reliably at scale.
He also consulted for army, coast guard and navy so whatever colours you pick for hazard marking in an industrial setting have to be _vaguely_ congruent or you're going to cause accidents.
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 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
And here I assumed they sounded like red-tailed hawks!
>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.
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.
The purpose stated in the article in the mind of Birren was to reduce eye strain. I don't think it's so much that humans "prefer" it as such, more that we're very well adapted to work in environments with lots of it.
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.
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.
https://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/books/user-interface-sof...
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.
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.
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?
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.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/07/19/1197961103/pantone-colors-law...
It looked like Google Maps to me so I made a comparison. What is old is new again? https://imgur.com/a/b6HCx78
It 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.
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
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.
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).
aha, so I need more karma
Mmmm it is quite nice
You immediately know when you're logged out (because the topbar goes from soothing to bright orange).
My autonomous YT show picked this thread up for today's episode — worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61BRALSFJxU
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.
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.
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
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)
Because chromium III oxide is a very light-fast pigment
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.)
Lots of old machinery from the era (Mills, Lathes, and such) also carried these colors.
Truly beautiful.
The 68 Ford Thunderbird (w/ suicide doors.) Mustangs also came in this color. https://imgur.com/a/BbzHVMn
I reported this to 99pi as an Article of Interest
Apollo Command Module interior colour is similar, and gorgeous.
This makes me think of the color scheme of Plan9. I think they chose that color design for similar reasons.
At the end...
PS: I have an old friend whose dad still works at the Uranium plant in Oak Ridge. I told him that I was surprised that almost all of the facilities had been torn down, and he just looked at me straight in the face and said, “Who said it’s actually gone?” Noted.
Many primary school classrooms in Italy had walls painted in that same colour, likely for the same reason.
Old school SCADA screens that I first saw had a similar green background.
I went to an old engineering school for grad school, all the older buildings had this color scheme.
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.
I wonder whether that was the inspiration for the extensive use of green in the interiors of Severance.
That’s a fascinating story!
I’d never even heard of this guy.
Gal.
> 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…
Also hospitals, though I think it's called "spinach-leaf green" then.
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.
Some of the old retired US aircraft carriers have their control rooms painted this color.
> There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible
Sure. But this is not one those things.
I'm with you.
> "The Manhattan Project created the nuclear bomb that caused extreme devastation in Japan and ended the war. There’s a lot of U.S. history that’s awful and indefensible."
That's one hell of a non-sequitur. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that word means what she thinks it means. "The US ended the worst war in human history. Indefensible!"
Did you read the next sentence?
That’s exactly the point. What “this” did you think was being referred to?
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.
I'm not sure how much it really matters but it is mildly annoying when people's brains just shut off when they hear atomic/nuclear.
It's perfectly reasonable to make an argument that they were "not needed" in terms of ending ww2, it's much, much more difficult to argue that fewer people would have died if they weren't used.
> He painted his bedroom walls red vermillion to test if it would make him go mad.
And? Did it?
I suppose that's up to us to judge
LOL I just bought a can of Dulux Sea Foam and one of Dulux Sea Foam Quarter yesterday
Why don't we do these things anymore? My office is all grey white desks.
I had our maintenance department custom paint my beige desk black when I moved into my office.
Su-27 fighter cockpit is known for its turquoise paneling that supposedly is to promote calm.
Yeah I was about to say similar pastel green colors crops up in a lot of Soviet control rooms too.
the Burt Reynolds poster
Definitely Tom Selleck, aka Magnum PI.
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.
"Make a color theme for my terminal based on the Birren and DuPont master color safety code for the industrial plant industry."
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.
good one, UX matters indeed
> I designed a font called “Parts List”
... that just screams "green plastic stencil ruler"
Wait, what? Ending the war in Japan was "indefensible"?
The poster of Magnum P.I. really tied the place together dude.
My mom had that exact poster in her home-office.
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.
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".)
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.
Why do doctors wear green?
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.
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.
Uh, I think they didn't use WW2 surplus anything when they build Oak Ridge and Hanford before the end of WW2. I also think given that those two plants were key bits of the Manhattan Project that they didn't cheap out on anything. And the color dude was in fact hired by DuPont who built those two plants and adopted his theories because they increased measured factory productivity and safety. Lastly the OG dude in the article was not an engineer. In fact he was an art school dropout who was very interested in color. So no on the no.
Half arsed article. Expected much more detail