Originally published at: The fascinating reason why yellow dominates TV graphics | Boing Boing
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See also: Powder blue baseball uniforms in the 70s-80s. Up to that point whites and grays dominated, but didn’t look so great on new color TVs.
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The weird thing is that CRT yellow is made of equal parts red and green, neither of which looks anywhere near as bright. There’s a lot of color non-linearity that the RCA team in the early fifties had to deal with to get flesh tones to not look nauseating, resulting in the NTSC color matrix trransformations.
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" Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons , consciously selected yellow for his characters, knowing its brightness would make the show easily identifiable during channel surfing."
This is an old fake story from old Simpsons publicity/hype from Matt. In actuality the color yellow was chosen/proposed by Gyorgyi Peluce, the colorist at Klasky-Csupo, their first animators for the bumpers on Tracy Ullman. She’s said she close it because she couldn’t default to flesh color, because the kids had no hairlines, and she wanted the color to really ‘pop’.
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… as someone who has passed out flyers and tried all the colors, I can testify that that one (amber or goldenrod or whatever it’s called) is also the most likely to get taken by passers-by in the real world
and not coincidentally, it’s also our emoji color 
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The Poker Face had a nice callout to the Columbo-era yellow credits. And then of course there’s…
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And it’s the emoji color because the yellow and black smiley face is an iconic image.
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You know, after all these decades of them being yellow it’s hard to imagine them any other way.
I know exactly what a colorist is and have great respect for the profession but that job title sounds almost like a term for a bigot who would object to different colors of Care Bears living together.
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yellow titling in Cooper Black typeface. how much more 1970s could you get?
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perfection!
dance me around under the mirror ball, i’m a disco inferno!
eta: i used to have a 70s VW bus in that root beer brown, cream and orange stripes like that “groovy” one! still miss that bus!
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TV Yellow was a popular colour for guitars in the 50’s because it looked good on B&W television. Something to do with white causing weird halo effects on cameras so yellow was used instead. Although there is a counter theory that TV yellow came from a popular colour for TV cabinets at the time.
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In color grading sometimes we crush the blacks (not as bad as it sounds, either).
A particular shade of yellow-green is supposed to be the most visible to the human eye. That’s why safety clothing is often that colour.
Back in the day, the Pickett slide rule company made a big deal in their advertising about the fact that their metal rules were that colour, supposedly to reduce eyestrain.
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PAL used YUV encoding but NTSC used YIQ. Analog television cameras did not use 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 chroma subsampling as these are digital concepts. The color bandwidth was limited by the analog encoding into YUV and YIQ. It is the luma component, the Y, which has the highest bandwidth. Hence in the title sequences shown the colored letters were all surrounded by black lines in order to allow for the sharpest definition. Had they not been there the edges of the letters would’ve been fuzzier. Solid red is rarely used as it is the most susceptible to noise. Solid green wouldn’t have been suitable because the green phosphors commonly used on home television CRTs were yellowish. The human eye has the lowest resolution and sensitivity in blue therefore that wouldn’t’ve been a good choice. That leaves white and yellow.
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Short answer: Contrast
Slightly longer answer, check @teknocholer’s comment. This is also why, in many countries including mine, warning street signs are black letters on a yellow background. The Human eye can see these easily.
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Just wondering (as someone who was an art student in the 1960s) when did GREEN become a PRIMARY colour?
In my world the primaries were red, blue and yellow. Green paint was created by mixing blue and yellow.
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Because paints and inks are subtractive colour, while screens that emit light use the additive colour model.
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