Convivial Ivory
Convivial Ivory (#F4F4E3) is a soft yellow with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (60°, 44%, 92%) places it in the balanced band at a light lightness. It works as a background wash, large-area fill, or soft illustration tone. Add a darker ink of the same hue when you need type over it. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary blue. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin convīviālis, of-the-banquet — adjectival suffix -al. As a color modifier, convivial implies a neutral-and-festive-and-friendly quality, the neutral color of medieval-and-Renaissance-banquet-hall festive-and-cordial-and-friendly hospitable-host interior-decoration-and-textile coordinated-color tone. Sits at the neutral-and-friendly end of the grid, parallel to cordial and gracious in usage.
The dentine of elephant and walrus tusk — the off-white biological material carved for ornament since prehistoric times, banned from most international trade since the 1989 CITES listing. The color refers to aged museum-collection ivory: a soft, very pale slightly warm off-white with the matte finish of ancient organic material. Warmer than bone, cooler than cream.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.
Wide gamut
The CSS Color 4 wide-gamut form of this color. Both swatches render the same color on every display — the P3 form only diverges from sRGB when a designer pushes channels outside sRGB's reach.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.