Rugged Pier Brick
Rugged Pier Brick (#EE3673) 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 (340°, 84%, 57%) places it in the highly saturated band at a mid 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 teal. For something softer, pull in its analogous neighbors on either side of the wheel.
Etymology
Old Norse rugga, rough / coarse — adjectival suffix -ed. As a color modifier, rugged implies a saturated-and-rough-and-weathered quality, the deep-rich color of Scottish-Highlands-and-Norwegian-fjord outdoor-and-mountain landscape. Sits at the bold-and-weathered end of the grid, parallel to tough and sinewy in usage.
Old French piere, stone / pier. As a color modifier, pier implies a sea-extending-walkway quality, the visual register of Brighton-and-Blackpool Victorian-period iron-and-wooden sea-pier pleasure-and-amusement promenade surfaces under bright English-seaside Victorian-pier light. Sits at the modifier-and-place end of the grid, parallel to jetty and wharf in usage.
Fired clay, mineral red. The color refers to common building brick — iron-rich earthenware kilned to the specific dusky red-orange of a Victorian terrace, a Roman aqueduct, an adobe wall in New Mexico. Less saturated than ruby, warmer than burgundy, with a chalky cast that reads as architectural rather than decorative.
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.