Neat Sumer Teal
Neat Sumer Teal (#217F80) is a deep cyan 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 (181°, 59%, 32%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old French net, clean / pure — sharing root with Latin nitidus. As a color modifier, neat implies a clear-and-orderly quality where the hue carries the well-arranged visual register without clutter or excess. Sits at the crisp-and-orderly end of the grid, parallel to trim and tidy in usage.
Akkadian Šumeru, Sumer. As a color modifier, sumer implies an ancient-Mesopotamian-and-cuneiform quality, the visual register of Sumerian-Ur-and-Uruk hand-built ziggurat-and-cuneiform-tablet bronze-age Mesopotamian city-state surfaces under Sumerian-Mesopotamian Ur-and-Uruk bronze-age city-state sun-baked-mud-brick light. Sits at the modifier-and-cultural end of the grid, parallel to akkad and median in usage.
Anas crecca, the small dabbling duck whose male in breeding plumage sports a chestnut head crossed by a glossy green-blue stripe. The color refers to that stripe — the iridescent panel just behind the eye: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical depth of structural color rather than pigment. Cooler than cypress, warmer than cerulean, with the ornithological specificity of a color named for one feather of one bird.
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.
Moderately saturated colors gain a small bump in P3 — the difference is usually visible side-by-side on wide-gamut hardware but won't change the character of the color.