Pale Stack
Pale Stack (#10011A) is a deep indigo with a jewel character. It carries the deep, saturated richness of a gemstone. Authoritative and slightly formal, it works well for type and heavy UI elements. Its HSL profile (276°, 93%, 5%) places it in the highly saturated band at a dark lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary lime. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
From the Latin pallidus, pale, wan — used as a color modifier since the medieval period for hues that read as low-saturation and high-light. Pale pink, pale yellow: low saturation combined with high lightness. Sits at the pale-bucket center alongside light and soft.
Old Norse stakka, haystack — adopted into English for the smokestack (chimney-stack) of Industrial-Revolution coal-fired factories and steamboat funnels. Stack color refers to a freshly soot-coated Bessemer-converter-period English steel-mill stack exterior in raking light: a saturated, slightly cool deep black with the matte finish of multi-decade soot-and-creosote sediment on hand-cut industrial brick.
Closest matches
The nearest named color in three reference sources, ranked by perceptual distance (ΔE76 in CIELAB). ΔE < 1 is imperceptible to most viewers; ΔE > 10 is clearly different. When two sources point to the same hex they’re merged into one tile; click any to open that color’s page.
Variations
Click any swatch to exploreHarmonies
Accessibility
How this color appears to viewers with the four major color-vision-deficiency types. Computed via the Machado (2009) physiologically-based model. If a tile matches the original, the color reads the same to that viewer.
The color used as foreground text against pure white and pure black, with the contrast ratio and WCAG 2.1 grade. Aim for AA (4.5:1) for body text and AA Large (3:1) for 18 pt+ headlines; AAA (7:1) is the gold standard for long-form reading surfaces.