Pitchy Onando
Pitchy Onando (#272F83) is a deep blue with an earthy character. It leans grounded and natural, the kind of color that plays well with wood, clay, linen, and warm neutrals. Its HSL profile (235°, 54%, 33%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English pic, pitch — adjectival suffix -y. As a color modifier, pitchy implies the deep-glossy-black quality of bitumen-and-pine-pitch viscous-residue surfaces, particularly the Norse-and-Viking longship-pine-tar caulking. Sits at the deepest-warm end of the grid, parallel to tarry and warmer than Stygian.
Japanese onando-iro (御納戸色) — honored storehouse color, the saturated grayed-blue of pre-modern Japanese clothing storehouse interiors. Traditional Edo-period onando was used in samurai household interiors and the linings of formal court dress. The color refers to a onando-painted Edo storehouse wall: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-gray with the matte finish of weathered distemper paint.
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.