Printed Anil
Printed Anil (#BBC6FA) 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 (230°, 86%, 86%) 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
Latin premere, to press — past-participle of print. As a color modifier, printed implies a clear-and-impressed-and-multiplied quality, the crisp color of Marimekko-and-Liberty-of-London hand-or-machine-printed textile-and-paper pattern-design. Sits at the crisp-and-printed end of the grid, parallel to stamped and etched in usage.
Portuguese and Spanish for Indigofera tinctoria — derived via the Arabic al-nīl from the Sanskrit nīla (dark blue), the colonial-era European name for indigo before indigo itself supplanted it in the 18th century. Anil color refers to a freshly anil-dyed Portuguese azulejo-period linen: a saturated, slightly cool deep blue-violet with the matte finish of multi-bath fermentation indigo on hand-spun linen.
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.