Comment #2 on issue 3694 by jbth...@gmail.com: Balloon message should be opaque for better readability http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=3694 I agree, the new burnt orange balloon color is too transparent and ugly, near-illegible, IMO. The former cyan color+transparency was very nice, why not keep that. (hmm, In the 1.1.1 image, there does not seem to be an initializer for the BalloonMorph BalloonColor classvar, and there are no senders of BalloonMorph class>>setBalloonColorTo: So possibly the initializer got lost a while back and we've been running on an image constant for some time.) I found the former nice cyan color is rgb = 977210367 alpha = 242 TranslucentColor r:0.91 g:0.94 b: 1.0 alpha: 0.949 (note: slight glitch, that r:g:b:alpha: expression actually yields alpha=241 rgb=977210367 It's constructed in the Squeak 4.1 BlueSmallLandColorTheme, as follows balloonColor ^ (self light: 1) twiceLighter alpha: 0.95 where (self light: 1) in this case is: (Color fromArray: #(0.85 0.9 1.0 )) Squeak 4.1 looks to have a reasonably well developed Color system with different themes. It's not clear that needs to be alternately re-implemented, if that's what's happening here. At least we should keep some of the good themes. Please lets restore the legacy cyan balloon color for now, and I agree with making this a themable SystemSetting. The quick fix patch for 1.2rc2 is BalloonMorph class>>defaultBalloonColor ^ (Color fromArray: #(0.85 0.9 1.0 )) twiceLighter alpha: 0.95