Welcoming Heki
Welcoming Heki (#9AADFD) is a soft blue with a pastel character. It reads calm and airy, with enough chroma to feel intentional rather than washed out. Its HSL profile (228°, 96%, 80%) 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 amber. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old English wel-cuman, well-coming — present-participle of welcome. As a color modifier, welcoming implies a clear-and-inviting-and-warm quality where the hue carries the visual register of cordial-and-hospitable color-tone. Sits at the crisp-and-cheerful end of the grid, parallel to hospitable and inviting in usage.
Japanese heki (碧) — a classical Sino-Japanese character spanning jade-green and deep-blue in pre-modern color vocabulary. Heki-iro names the saturated blue of polished imperial-grade nephrite. The color refers to a polished Japanese nephrite yu disc: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-green with the satin finish of fine jade.
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.