Heroic Draco Rose
Heroic Draco Rose (#DF3D6B) is a true red with a vibrant character. It holds its own as a focal accent, carrying visual weight without tipping into neon territory. Its HSL profile (343°, 72%, 56%) 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Latin hēroicus, of a hero — derived from Greek hērōs. As a color modifier, heroic implies a saturated-and-monumental-and-victorious quality, the deep-rich color of Wagner-and-Sibelius late-Romantic-era musical-and-painterly heroic-mode. Sits at the bold-and-celebratory end of the grid, parallel to triumphant and valiant.
Latin draco, dragon-of-the-northern-sky. As a color modifier, draco implies a winding-northern-circumpolar-dragon quality, the visual register of Draco-circumpolar-and-northern-dragon hand-winding-northern-circumpolar-dragon Draco-circumpolar-and-northern-dragon-and-Bortle-1-sky draco-and-winding-northern-circumpolar surfaces under Draco-circumpolar-and-northern-dragon-and-Bortle-1-sky year-round-northern-circumpolar polar-stellar-light. Sits at the modifier-and-cosmic end of the grid, parallel to cygnus and lyra in usage.
The Latin rosa, the Greek rhodon, the Persian gul — every European language has a different name for the same flower and the same color. Rose covers the spectrum from blush to fuchsia depending on the cultivar, but in pigment shorthand it means a cool, slightly bluish red — the inside of a damask petal, the dye that washes out of madder root.
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 is chromatic enough that authoring it as P3 native (instead of clamping to sRGB) gives a perceptibly more saturated render on wide-gamut displays — modern Macs, iPhones, iPads, and most recent OLED laptops.