Adequately Avocet
Adequately Avocet (#BFC0CF) 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 (236°, 14%, 78%) places it in the muted band at a light lightness. It works as a background wash, large-area fill, or soft illustration tone. Add a darker ink of the same hue when you need type over it. 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
Latin adaequātus, made equal — adverbial-and-adjectival suffix -ly. As a color modifier, adequately implies a neutral-and-sufficient-and-fitting quality where the hue carries the visual register of sufficiently-fitting-and-adequately-coordinated color-decision matched to its functional requirement. Sits at the neutral-and-traditional end of the grid, parallel to sufficiently and appropriately in usage.
Recurvirostra avosetta — a Recurvirostridae shorebird of European-Asian-and-African saline-and-brackish-water habitats, with iconic pure-white-and-black plumage and a recurved-upturned bill. Avocet color refers to a Recurvirostra avosetta dorsal-feather field on a British-East-Anglia salt-marsh: a pale cool gray with the matte finish of melanin-depleted feather barbs against melanin-pigmented black-and-white wing-pattern.
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.
Wide gamut
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.
This color sits well within the sRGB cube. P3 and sRGB share the gray axis and most desaturated tones, so a P3 display renders this identically to an sRGB display.