Butter Yellow#FFFD74, a warm-leaning brilliant lemon

Butter Yellow in RGB, HSL, OKLCH & more

Ready to ship: every line pastes straight into your codebase, and the whole file copies at once.

ART is Rhapsody's perceptual model. How ART works

What kind of yellow is Butter Yellow?

Every color has a place in the standard vocabulary. This is Butter Yellow's, measured rather than asserted.

Butter Yellow's Munsell numbers - the industry way of describing hue, value (how light), and chroma (how vivid) - come up one short. Value reads 9.7. Hue and chroma don't, because the reference data behind that math thins out at the very light and very dark ends of the scale, and at value 9.7 it runs dry before the math converges. Printing a hue or chroma here would be invented, not measured, so Rhapsody leaves them blank. ISCC-NBS, the standard built on top of Munsell that sorts every color into one of 267 named ranges, still places this one in brilliant greenish yellow, by its nearest match.

Nothing else on this page leans on that missing number. The tonal scale, the pairings, and the press comparison below all come from separate measurements, and they land on Butter Yellow just fine. It's the notation that runs dry here, not the color.

Munsell coordinates and block from the ISCC-NBS system, computed by Rhapsody's own renotation inversion.

Shades of Butter Yellow, lighter and darker

For hover states, washed backgrounds, and dark surfaces that still read as #FFFD74. 13 steps, spaced evenly by eye, with the color itself sitting at its natural depth, butter-yellow-200.

Tints (light surfaces; dark text passes on every one)

Midtones (the color at full strength, for brand & accent work)

Shades (dark surfaces; light text passes on every one)

Is Butter Yellow accessible? Contrast with white & black

Strong contrast makes your work readable by everyone, and meets the WCAG standard accessibility law points at. AA is the floor; AAA is the tier worth aiming for in body text. Black text on #FFFD74 clears WCAG AAA. Every strip below is one surface, and the marks are the steps that reach AAA on it.

Rows are text, columns are background · 64 of 210 pairings reach WCAG 2.2 AAA, shown here.

Butter Yellow in CMYK: one value for files, one per press

None of these presses can print this color. It's lighter than the paper, and ink only darkens a sheet, so the brightest thing on a printed page is the page itself. So what do you do? Pick a brighter stock, or let the paper be your lightest tone and build the contrast somewhere else.

In CMYK, #FFFD74 is C0 · M0.8 · Y54.5 · K0. That is the value design tools and file formats use when no press is involved.

On press (what each standard prints)

Press values computed through the ICC characterization data each standard proofs against. Each CMYK above is the closest that standard can get. None of them reaches the color. It sits above the paper's own white.

Colors similar to Butter Yellow

Here are other colors similar to Butter Yellow along with accessible text pairings and whether or not they're print-safe. Explore The Lemons

Colors that go with Butter Yellow

The complementary color, straight across the wheel, is a cool-leaning vivid indigo #5742CC. Rhapsody's pick is the split complement, just to one side of it, a livelier pair.

The accent is for the moments that need attention, the harmony for the ones that need calm; the neutral carries the text and surfaces in between.

Take Butter Yellow with you

The work on this page doesn't stay here. Save a card and the color arrives in your file, your deck or your board already decided.