Office Lighting

Anyone that knows me knows this is a subject I am passionate about.

These pictures from the new Mojang offices inspired me to write about it:

Pics

When I interview somewhere it is the first thing I look for:  Overhead Fluorescent lights.  It is a big warning klaxon going off and tells me you don’t care about your people or your art.

I get a massive headache under those things in less than an hour.  I’ve never actually looked for any scientific reason as to why, but every place I’ve ever worked that had them generally turned them off in the offices themselves.  I have seen a place which I shall not name that had a giant cube farm underneath them.  Talk about pure misery!

I have however seen people in offices that leave them on.  In this case it was a level designer.  When that last minute E3 build rush arrived, all the levels were thrown in a big demo together.  When we get to the lit office guy’s level, we discovered that he had quite violently adjusted his monitor so he could see it in the flickery pale glare of his soul sapping lighting.

The level was messed up bad.  This was a lightmapped level, back before we knew about proper gamma as well.  It got chopped.

Take any piece of colorful art and display it on a monitor in a dimly lit room, then look at it under the evil lights.  You should notice quite a difference.

I’ve no idea if Mojang got it right or not, as I don’t see any workstations in the pictures, but the areas shown look very nice.  You can see everything but it isn’t blinding, and more importantly a display screen would look good in there.