Grounded Acanthus
Grounded Acanthus (#503EC1) is a true 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 (248°, 51%, 50%) 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 yellow. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English grund, bottom / foundation — past-participle of ground. As a color modifier, grounded implies a saturated-and-foundational quality where the hue anchors the surrounding palette through its weighty presence. Sits at the bold-and-balanced end of the grid, parallel to centered and anchored.
Mediterranean Acanthus mollis and A. spinosus — the bear's breeches, whose deeply scalloped leaves furnished the Corinthian capital's signature ornamental motif since the 5th century BCE. Acanthus color refers to a fully bloomed Acanthus mollis flower spike: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the velvet finish of two-lipped tubular flowers in a tall hooded spike. Foundational to the Western architectural ornamental vocabulary.
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 is chromatic enough that authoring it as P3 native (instead of clamping to sRGB) gives a perceptibly more saturated render on wide-gamut displays — modern Macs, iPhones, iPads, and most recent OLED laptops.