Tempest in a Teapot
#303a40
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
#303a40
RGB
48, 58, 64
OKLCh
34.2% 0.017 234.3°
CIELAB (D50)
23.7, -3.1, -5.2
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 2 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses only 24% 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 96.8; 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.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 6.0 and 6.4 and 13.5 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
11.63:1 — passes AA
Black text
1.80:1 — fails AA
White text is the better of the two at11.63:1. That is enough for body text.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#303a40
protanopia
#393940 · ΔE00 6.0
deuteranopia
#373740 · ΔE00 6.4
tritanopia
#353554 · ΔE00 13.5
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isElectromagnetic at ΔE00 1.322: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- ElectromagneticΔE00 1.322 · #2e3840
- Dracula OrchidΔE00 1.938 · #2c3539
- MirageΔE00 2.173 · #373f43
- Big StoneΔE00 2.243 · #334046
- Blue PlazaΔE00 2.316 · #30363c
- Mine ShaftΔE00 2.47 · #373e41
- Anthracite GreyΔE00 2.475 · #373f42
- FerryΔE00 2.61 · #383e44
- Cool Operator’s OverallsΔE00 2.615 · #384248
- PrecisionΔE00 2.672 · #2c3944
- InkwellΔE00 2.724 · #31363a
- Far Away GreyΔE00 2.731 · #2d383a
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.