Dense Truss Ruby
Dense Truss Ruby (#A91C24) is a true red with a warm character. It leans warm, pulling light toward red, orange, and yellow. Naturally inviting, it suits editorial and hospitality contexts. Its HSL profile (357°, 72%, 39%) 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 cyan. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin dēnsus, thick / crowded — sharing root with English condense. As a color modifier, dense implies a saturated-and-tightly-packed quality where the hue carries maximum pigmentation per visual unit-of-area. Sits at the bold-and-saturated end of the grid, parallel to thick and concentrated in usage.
Old French trousse, bundle / framework. As a color modifier, truss implies a triangular-roof-frame quality, the visual register of English-and-Welsh-truss-roof hand-built triangular-roof-frame timber-and-steel truss-and-rafter architectural surfaces under timber-and-steel truss-roof structural light. Sits at the modifier-and-architecture end of the grid, parallel to gable and eave in usage.
From the Latin ruber — simply, red. The gemstone is a chromium-tinged corundum, harder than anything in nature except diamond, and so saturated that a fine Burmese pigeon's blood ruby at auction outpaces a comparable diamond by weight. The color borrows the gem's confidence: a clear, glassy red without the brown of garnet or the blue of crimson.
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.