Flashing Pansy
Flashing Pansy (#8986F0) is a soft blue 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 (242°, 78%, 73%) places it in the highly saturated band at a light lightness. Best used in small doses, like logos, CTAs, focus rings, or highlight text, where its saturation becomes a feature rather than noise. 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 flasch, flash — present-participle of flash. As a color modifier, flashing implies a saturated-and-rapid-on-off quality, the bright color of emergency-vehicle and photographic-flash light-burst surfaces. Sits at the bright-and-flashing end of the grid, parallel to coruscating and flickering in usage.
Viola × wittrockiana, the cultivated garden pansy bred in the nineteenth century from wild Viola tricolor. The color refers to the deep purple-blue field of a Pansy Imperial hybrid: a saturated, slightly violet-shifted deep blue with the velvet finish of a five-petaled face. Cooler than amethyst, warmer than indigo, with the cottage-garden weight of a flower that overwinters in mild climates and blooms when nothing else does.
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.