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Pressed Spire Lagoon

#30aec8
Notes

Pressed Spire Lagoon (#30AEC8) is a true 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 (190°, 61%, 49%) 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 red. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#30aec8
RGB
rgb(48, 174, 200)
HSL
hsl(190, 61%, 49%)
HWB
hwb(190 19% 22%)
OKLCH
oklch(69.5% 0.111 215.1)
P3
color(display-p3 0.3483 0.6728 0.7717)
HSV
hsv(190, 76%, 78%)
LAB
lab(65.80% -24.82 -22.92)
LCH
lch(65.80% 33.79 222.73)
CMYK
cmyk(76%, 13%, 0%, 22%)

Etymology

Pressed
adjective

Latin pressāre, to press — past-participle of press. As a color modifier, pressed implies a clear-and-smoothed-and-flattened quality, the crisp color of Mid-Century-Modern freshly-pressed-shirt-and-trouser ironed-textile finish. Sits at the crisp-and-finished end of the grid, parallel to ironed and starched in usage.

Spire
modifier

Old English spīr, blade-of-grass / point. As a color modifier, spire implies a tall-pointed-vertical quality, the visual register of Salisbury-Cathedral-and-Chartres-Cathedral hand-built tall-pointed Gothic-and-Romanesque cathedral-spire architectural surfaces under tall-cathedral-spire-against-sky light. Sits at the modifier-and-architecture end of the grid, parallel to tower and turret in usage.

Lagoon
noun

A shallow body of saltwater partially or fully enclosed by a barrier — coral atoll lagoons in the Pacific, Venice's Laguna Veneta, the Florida Keys' backcountry. The color refers to the average reflectance of a calm tropical lagoon at midday: a saturated, slightly muted blue-green with the optical clarity of shallow water over white sand. Brighter than reef, cooler than aquamarine, with the postcard weight of a Pacific atoll seen from above.

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 explore

Harmonies

Accessibility

Color-vision simulation

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.

#30aec8
Original
#9ca8c9
Protanopia
#8799c8
Deuteranopia
#00b8b6
Tritanopia
#959595
Achromatopsia
WCAG contrast

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.

The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
Failon White
2.62:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAAon Black
8.01:1

Wide gamut

Display P3 representation

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.

sRGB hex
sRGB hex
##30AEC8
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.3483 0.6728 0.7717)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.111

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.

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