Way Beyond the Blue
#1188cc
A blue that is muted. It is light — black text sits on it comfortably, white text does not.
Hex
#1188cc
RGB
17, 136, 204
OKLCh
60.1% 0.139 242.4°
CIELAB (D50)
53.4, -11.6, -44.3
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 7 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses 97% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue — close enough to the boundary that a wider display would show it slightly more vividly.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 65.7; on black, Lc -36.0. The sign is the polarity, which the WCAG ratio discards.
- Built into an eleven-step scale, 10 of the 10 adjacent pairs stay ΔE00 2 apart — see the ramp.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 19.4 and 18.8 and 18.8 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
3.88:1 — large text only
Black text
5.42:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at5.42:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#007dbe is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved, and some saturation was given up to stay inside sRGB.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#1188cc
protanopia
#8181cc · ΔE00 19.4
deuteranopia
#7474cd · ΔE00 18.8
tritanopia
#6464ff · ΔE00 18.8
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isWater Blue at ΔE00 0.396: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Water BlueΔE00 0.396 · #0e87cc
- Klaxosaur BlueΔE00 1.077 · #2987c7
- Newport BlueΔE00 1.109 · #1c8ac9
- Zürich BlueΔE00 1.259 · #248bcc
- Ticino BlueΔE00 1.312 · #268bcc
- Calgar BlueΔE00 1.71 · #0485d1
- Water RacewayΔE00 1.849 · #0083c8
- Azul CaribeΔE00 2.335 · #0089c4
- Lvivian RainΔE00 2.39 · #0182cc
- Pat-A-PepΔE00 2.489 · #3887bd
- Blue ColaΔE00 2.565 · #0088dc
- King TritonΔE00 2.814 · #3c85be
11 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.