Piano Black
#17171a
A neutral that has no useful hue — it reads as a grey. It is dark — it carries white text and needs care with black.
Hex
#17171a
RGB
23, 23, 26
OKLCh
20.6% 0.006 285.9°
CIELAB (D50)
7.8, 0.6, -2.1
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 4 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 5% of the chroma available at this lightness and hue — there is a far more vivid version of this colour inside sRGB.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 104.7; on black, Lc 0.0. 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.
- All three dichromacies see it as very nearly the same colour you do: its hue is not the part carrying its identity.
Text on this colour
White text
17.89:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.17:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at17.89:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#17171a
protanopia
#17171a · ΔE00 0.0
deuteranopia
#17171a · ΔE00 0.0
tritanopia
#17171a · ΔE00 0.0
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isAswad Black at ΔE00 0.935: below 1.0 — an ordinary observer cannot tell these apart, even side by side. What the numbers mean.
- Aswad BlackΔE00 0.935 · #17181c
- Dark VoidΔE00 1.004 · #151517
- Dark MoonΔE00 1.752 · #161718
- Kettle BlackΔE00 1.942 · #141314
- Gluon GreyΔE00 2.1 · #1a1b1c
- Cynical BlackΔE00 2.196 · #171717
- Inkwell InceptionΔE00 2.199 · #1e1e21
- Thamar BlackΔE00 2.209 · #181818
- Pot BlackΔE00 2.224 · #161616
- Matt BlackΔE00 2.289 · #151515
- Ruined SmoresΔE00 2.317 · #0f1012
- SootyΔE00 2.382 · #141414
6 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.