Murky Sora
Murky Sora (#1B4867) is a deep azure with a cool character. It leans cool, sitting on the blue, green, and violet side of the wheel. Quiet and dependable, a fit for product UI and data visualization. Its HSL profile (204°, 58%, 25%) places it in the balanced band at a dark lightness. It works well as a headline, icon, or deep background in an otherwise light layout, pairing cleanly with cream, bone, and warm neutrals. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary orange. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
From Old Norse myrkr, darkness — sharing root with mirkwood. Murky implies low value combined with reduced clarity — the deep brown-greens of pond water, the dim interior of a smoke-blackened bar. Sits at the deep-and-dirtied end of the grid, where the color is both dark and slightly clouded.
The Japanese word for sky — and sora-iro (空色), the standard Japanese name for sky-blue. Used in Heian-period waka poetry and ukiyo-e woodblock prints for the saturated mid-blue of clear summer skies. The color refers to a Japanese summer sky at midday: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue with the optical brightness of mid-latitude scattered sunlight.
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.
Wide gamut
The CSS Color 4 wide-gamut form of this color. Both swatches render the same color on every display — the P3 form only diverges from sRGB when a designer pushes channels outside sRGB's reach.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.