Off-white / bone / cream
A near-white warmed with a trace of beige or yellow, used when pure screen white feels too sharp, cold, or clinical.
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What it is
Off-white is any near-white nudged away from pure white; bone and cream name common warm versions with a beige or yellow bias. The names are descriptive, not standardized coordinates, so one brand's bone may be another brand's ivory. They borrow their feel from unbleached paper, linen, plaster, and natural fibers rather than from a lit white screen.
Reach for them when #ffffff feels clinical or produces too much glare across a large surface. A warm near-white makes editorial pages, hospitality brands, food packaging, and reading-heavy interfaces feel more like material than emitted light. Keep the chroma low enough that people still call it white at a glance.
Gotcha: warm whites look dirty beside pure white and can turn greenish or pink beside a neutral with the opposite undertone. Choose one page white as the reference, judge every card and image border against it, and recheck text contrast after tinting. Near-white is still a background color, not a substitute for sufficient lightness separation.
Ask AI for it
Replace pure #ffffff surfaces with a warm off-white system using CSS oklch(). Define --paper as oklch(97% 0.012 80), create one slightly darker bone surface and one slightly warmer cream accent surface, and keep all three below 0.025 chroma so they still read as white. Apply --paper to the page, bone to cards, and cream only to highlighted panels. Show each beside pure white, then verify every body-text pairing clears a 4.5:1 contrast ratio.