Deep Furnace
Deep Furnace (#12011B) 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 (279°, 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
Old English dēop, profound, far down — sharing root with dive and dipper. In color shorthand, deep implies low lightness combined with high saturation: a deep red is darker than crimson but no less chromatic. Where dark describes value alone, deep implies that the hue still has presence at that low light level. Closer to rich than to somber.
Latin fornax, baking oven — the deep-soot-black interior of Industrial-Revolution iron-and-glass smelting plants, where the blast-furnace coke-and-coal combustion residue accumulates. Furnace color refers to a Bessemer-period English steel-mill blast-furnace interior at the cooling phase: a saturated, slightly cool deep black with the matte finish of multi-decade slag-and-coke residue on hand-cut refractory firebrick.
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.