10. The Blues

Oh. That's my favorite color and that was the question. But let's elaborate on what shades, plural, because I never seem to have a singular answer for anything!

If I had to pick just one? Let's make it Sapphire Blue– my birthstone. Or, as science calls it, YInMn Blue. Ultramarine also counts (as well as International Klein Blue). It is basically an intense deep and dark blue, with the darkest shade having been created in a lab or really heckin' rare, or both.

The hex code for "blue" is pretty much the vibe I'm going for– it gently strobes a bit if you stare at it for too long. But when I'm feeling a little fancy, I shift to "Electric Ultramarine".

Fun fact: this is the default color for hyperlinks.

Below is the websafe hex code.

But...

That's my favorite color offline. Online, it's a much lighter color: DeepSkyBlue. Only second behind #CAF, it was a name I kept in my "quick text color" list (as the easier-to-type and websafe #0CF). But I incorporated it in a lot of my design layouts.

Here's a swatch of DeepSkyBlue, also websafe:

And...

I have a favorite shade of blue for my operating system theme. While it's true I rarely strayed from the default Windows XP one, it's a different story once I start customizing things.

If I could find all the dropdown options that were available at that time, I would. I probably just picked one of those if there was a blue one as an option. But here's a good approximation of what I like on my desktop, courtesy of the Common Desktop Environment: teal-ish, leaning more toward the blue side of things.

So, that color would be something like the below swatch (with its websafe neighbor looking a lot like the Windows 95 Green).

Some Notes

With how RBG and color calibration works, all this stuff here is approximate. But you get the gist of it.

And, oh yeah, what did I mean by "websafe"? These are colors that did not vary between web browsers– they looked the same in all of them. HTML Color Codes has a Web Safe Color Chart for more examples.