Crisp Crenel Olive
Crisp Crenel Olive (#56AA26) is a true lime 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 (98°, 63%, 41%) 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 indigo. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin crispus, curled — drifted in English from the curled hair sense to fresh and clean. As a color modifier, crisp implies saturation combined with optical clarity, with no haze or film between the eye and the surface. Used across the bright and crisp buckets where the hue is fresh-looking. Slightly less assertive than vivid.
Old French crenel, battlement-notch. As a color modifier, crenel implies a castle-battlement-notch-between-merlons quality, the visual register of medieval-castle-battlement hand-cut crenel-and-merlon-castle-battlement notch-and-tooth-pattern fortification-architecture surfaces under medieval-castle-battlement defensive light. Sits at the modifier-and-architecture end of the grid, parallel to merlon and keep in usage.
Olea europaea, the Mediterranean tree cultivated for at least six thousand years for fruit and oil. The color refers specifically to a green olive cured in brine before ripening: a slightly muted, yellow-shifted green with the matte surface of a fruit eaten before it darkens. Drabber than lime, warmer than moss, with the agricultural weight of a tree that can live two thousand years.
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.