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Redeem nowInspiration in the color yellow.
Learn the history and meaning of the color yellow — and prepare to be surprised.
Get inspired with yellow design templates.
The history and psychology of yellow help inspire attention-getting work.
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How to use the color yellow.
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Use the psychology of yellow color.
Yellow color is instantly associated with warmth. Combine yellow with other warm colors like red and orange and it can give off excitement and heat. Yellow can also stir mental sharpness because of its kinetic energy. The color yellow is also seen as youthful and eager.
Think of springtime (and especially of flowers).
Yellow color is found abundantly in nature. From daisies to sunflowers, it’s a bright color found in an especially great number of flowers. Yellow is the color of pollen, too, placing bright yellow highlights all over the flowerbed.
Yellow color for high visibility.
The color yellow is highly visible. The human eye processes yellow before other colors. This makes it a great accent color as well as a color of caution. Consider yellow a color that gets instant attention.
The color yellow can be used with other colors to achieve many effects.
Yellow color is said to “react badly” when combined with black. This bumblebee-jacket-combination turns yellow into a green-yellow tint. Otherwise, yellow is friendly with most colors. Yellow works especially well with purple, which is its complementary color.
Information about yellow color.
The yellow HEX code picker is #FFFF00. Yellow is the brightest color of the spectrum and instantly brightens a space.
Yellow color can be achieved in a RGB space with 255 red, 255 green, and 0 blue. Yellow can be achieved in a CMYK color space with 6% cyan, 0% magenta, 97% yellow, and 0% black.
The history of yellow.
Yellow color was first tied to everything gold.
The color yellow was associated with gold in Ancient Egypt. Because gold is imperishable, eternal, and indestructible, yellow color was seen to represent these things. The Egyptians said that the very bones and skin of the gods were made of gold, and they painted the gods in yellow. Blonde hair was described in Ancient Egyptian and Roman literature as “golden” and was also painted in yellow.
Yellow took on negative associations tied to religion.
Yellow was later adopted in Christian lore as the color of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus Christ. Yellow was tied to treachery as a result. The color yellow also came to mean envy, cowardice, and deceit. In the 16th century, the Spanish Inquisition dressed those accused of heresy in a yellow cape. Through the Renaissance, parts of Western Europe started marking “outsiders,” such as Jews, with yellow stars. This xenophobic use of yellow was re-adopted by Nazi Germany centuries later.
Yellow took its contemporary meaning after the Renaissance.
When synthetic paints were invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, the color yellow was reborn. A British painter named J.M.W. Turner was one of the first in the 19th century to use yellow color to influence moods. He believed color could be as impactful as music and felt he “composed” with colors. Later, with the invention of the comic strip in 1895, a lone comic character named Mickey Dugan donned a yellow shirt that gave the beloved new genre the name “yellow journalism.”
The color yellow across different cultures.
The word “yellow” in English comes from the word for gold.
Just like the Ancient Egyptians and Romans used yellow to depict gold, the word “yellow” came to English from golden roots, too. “Yellow” comes from an Old English word “geolu” that shares its Indo-European root with the word “gold.”
Yellow has many positive associations in the West, but can also mean “warning.”
Yellow is what many people in the West associate with happiness, humor, and spontaneity. Its antiquated meanings of deceit and jealousy have mostly disappeared. Yellow can, however, still refer to cowardice. Yellow also became an important color in traffic signals in the 20th century. Yellow is highly visible from great distances at high speeds, and in many countries yellow has replaced other colors on emergency vehicles.
The color yellow has added meanings around the world.
In Iran, yellow color has a dual meaning of either sickness or wisdom. In China, yellow represents happiness along with glory and wisdom. In the Polynesian islands, yellow is a sacred color of divine essence. In Japan, yellow represents courage, which is a far throw from the Western association of yellow with cowardice. In Russia, a colloquial expression dubbed mental hospitals “yellow houses.”