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Heavy Vesta Cobalt

#5980d6
Notes

Heavy Vesta Cobalt (#5980D6) is a true azure 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 (221°, 60%, 59%) 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.

HEX
#5980d6
RGB
rgb(89, 128, 214)
HSL
hsl(221, 60%, 59%)
HWB
hwb(221 35% 16%)
OKLCH
oklch(61.2% 0.138 264.3)
P3
color(display-p3 0.3818 0.4978 0.8150)
HSV
hsv(221, 58%, 84%)
LAB
lab(54.46% 12.18 -48.34)
LCH
lch(54.46% 49.85 284.14)
CMYK
cmyk(58%, 40%, 0%, 16%)

Etymology

Heavy
adjective

Old English hefig, weighty — cognate with heave. Used as a color modifier since at least the seventeenth century to indicate weight in saturation as much as value: heavy with pigment, heavy-bodied. In the engine's adjective grid, heavy sits alongside deep and plush in the dark-and-saturated quadrant. Closer to a fabric description than a pure value word.

Vesta
modifier

Latin Vesta, Roman-goddess-of-hearth. As a color modifier, vesta implies an asteroid-and-hearth-flame-and-bright-and-rocky quality, the visual register of Vesta-asteroid-and-Roman-hearth hand-asteroid-and-hearth-flame-and-bright Vesta-asteroid-and-Roman-hearth-and-Dawn-mission vesta-and-asteroid-and-hearth-flame-and-bright surfaces under Vesta-asteroid-and-Roman-hearth-and-Dawn-mission asteroid-belt-and-Vestal-Temple sacred-flame-light. Sits at the modifier-and-cosmic end of the grid, parallel to ceres and juno in usage.

Cobalt
noun

Element Co, atomic number 27 — German Kobold, goblin, named by miners who found the metal interfered with smelting silver ore. Cobalt blue is the cobalt-aluminate pigment introduced by Louis Jacques Thénard in 1802: a saturated, slightly green-shifted deep blue with the matte finish of mineral pigment in oil. Cooler than ultramarine, warmer than prussian, with the painter's weight of a pigment used by Renoir, Van Gogh, and Cézanne.

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.

#5980d6
Original
#5b88d9
Protanopia
#4a7dd4
Deuteranopia
#0093a1
Tritanopia
#7e7e7e
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).
AA Largeon White
3.83:1
The quick brown foxSample body text at normal size. The wcag minimum for body contrast is 4.5:1 (AA) or 7:1 (AAA).
AAon Black
5.48:1

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
##5980D6
Display P3
Display P3
color(display-p3 0.3818 0.4978 0.8150)
P3 has subtle headroomOKLCH chroma 0.138

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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