Minerva#00A9FF, a cool brilliant blue
Minerva in RGB, HSL, OKLCH & more
Ready to ship: every line pastes straight into your codebase, and the whole file copies at once.
ART is Rhapsody's perceptual model. How ART works
Why is it called Minerva?
Minerva's meaning, origin, and pronunciation, with sources.
Anchor: A42 · one of the 72 anchor hues of ART
Origin: Latin, likely absorbed from Etruscan
Meaning: The Roman goddess of wisdom, craft, and strategic war
mih-NUR-vuh
Etruscan Menrva → Latin Minerva → English Minerva, the goddess Rome identified with the Greek Athena.
Her name is often connected to the ancient Indo-European root *men-, "to think," the ancestor of mind and mental. But that stop in Etruscan makes a clean line impossible to prove, so the goddess of wisdom keeps her word history to herself. Which feels about right.
The color comes from her Greek counterpart's most famous title. Athena is glaukōpis: "gleaming-eyed," "gray-blue-eyed," perhaps "owl-eyed." And glaukos is ancient Greek's other great blue-ish word, the one beside kyanos: it covers light blue, gray, and green, and it sorts colors more by their gleam than by their hue. Her owl still carries that gaze onto every university seal.
etymonline s.v. Minerva; LSJ s.v. γλαυκῶπις. Etymological dictionaries + scholarly sources. Audio: synthesized (en_US-lessac-medium).
Shades of Minerva, lighter and darker
For hover states, washed backgrounds, and dark surfaces that still read as #00A9FF. 13 steps, spaced evenly by eye, with the color itself sitting at its natural depth, minerva-500.
Tints (light surfaces; dark text passes on every one)
Midtones (the color at full strength, for brand & accent work)
Shades (dark surfaces; light text passes on every one)
Most tools mix. Rhapsody measures.
Paste any color. The whole system comes back, contrast-checked before you see it.
The window on the right was generated from #00A9FF, like this whole page.
Is Minerva accessible? Contrast with white & black
Strong contrast makes your work readable by everyone, and meets the WCAG standard accessibility law points at. AA is the floor; AAA is the tier worth aiming for in body text. Black text on #00A9FF clears WCAG AAA. Every strip below is one surface, and the marks are the steps that reach AAA on it.
Rows are text, columns are background · 66 of 210 pairings reach WCAG 2.2 AAA, shown here.
Ship the audit, not screenshots.
Run #00A9FF against the colors you actually ship, every pairing and any target, and export it: exact ratios, the AA tier, APCA, in one file.
The audit on the right was calibrated from #00A9FF, like this whole page.
Minerva in CMYK: one value for files, one per press
This color shifts further than a press run can hold, so expect a visible difference. The pairs below show where each standard lands.
In CMYK, #00A9FF is . That is the value design tools and file formats use when no press is involved.
On press (what each standard prints)
shifts ΔE00 5.8, 2.3× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 5.7, 2.3× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 5.4, 2.2× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 4.4, 1.8× the 2.5 a run varies by
shifts ΔE00 5.1, 2.0× the 2.5 a run varies by
Press values computed through the ICC characterization data each standard proofs against. Each CMYK above is the closest that standard can get.
No surprises at the printer.
Run any color through the major press standards: FOGRA51, GRACoL, Japan Color, FOGRA39. It's coming soon. Create a free account and you'll get a note the moment it's live.
The strip shows this page's tints and shades on screen, then through a standard GRACoL 2013 conversion.
Colors similar to Minerva
The Roman goddess of wisdom, craft, and strategic war
Here are other colors similar to Minerva along with accessible text pairings and whether or not they're print-safe. Explore The Blues
| Xanadu | Xanadu | #00B4FF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Picton Blue | Picton Blue | #45B1E8 | black text · AAA | ! within tolerance |
| Skylark | Skylark | #00BFFF | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Cornflower Blue | Cornflower Blue | #6495ED | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Dark Sky Blue | Dark Sky Blue | #448EE4 | black text · AA | ✕ shifts on press |
| Curious Blue | Curious Blue | #2596D1 | black text · AA | ! within tolerance |
| Havelock Blue | Havelock Blue | #5590D9 | black text · AA | ! within tolerance |
| Danube | Danube | #6093D1 | black text · AA | ! within tolerance |
| Carolina Blue | Carolina Blue | #8AB8FE | black text · AAA | ✕ shifts on press |
Colors that go with Minerva
The complementary color, straight across the wheel, is a warm bold scarlet #E36C4E. Rhapsody's pick is the split complement, just to one side of it, a livelier pair.
The accent is for the moments that need attention, the harmony for the ones that need calm; the neutral carries the text and surfaces in between.
Take Minerva with you
The work on this page doesn't stay here. Save a card and the color arrives in your file, your deck or your board already decided.
Your system is already built.
Rhapsody built it before you even asked: the scale, the neutrals, the utilities, every pairing calibrated.
This page's whole theme is built from one color. Palette does the same for yours: every step calibrated, every pairing checked, press included.
Every color on this page was calibrated, not mixed.
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