Deathly Saxon
Deathly Saxon (#1E3594) is a true blue 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 (228°, 66%, 35%) places it in the balanced band at a mid lightness. It works across type, buttons, and borders, saturated enough to feel deliberate but balanced enough to not fight the rest of the palette. For a confident two-color system, pair it with its complementary amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English dēath, death — adjectival suffix -ly. As a color modifier, deathly implies a deep-cool-and-pallid quality, the cold-shifted darkness associated with mortality and absence of vital warmth. Sits at the deep-and-cool end of the grid, parallel to funereal but with pallor undertone.
Saxon blue — a sulfuric-acid extraction of indigo developed in eighteenth-century Saxony that produced a brighter, slightly green-shifted blue than traditional indigo vat dyeing. The color refers to a Saxon-blue dyed wool: a saturated, slightly green-shifted deep blue with the matte finish of dyed natural fiber. Brighter than indigo, cooler than royal, with the textile-history weight of an industrial-process pigment that briefly competed with traditional indigo.
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.