Colour theory
Colour harmonies: analogous, triadic and split
Named recipes for picking colours off the wheel. Useful starting points, not rules that guarantee a good result.
Presented by ClearTrust Free for designers, students and the curious.
A colour harmony is a recipe for choosing colours by their positions on the wheel. Analogous schemes use neighbours. Triadic schemes use three hues spaced evenly. Split-complementary schemes use one hue and the two on either side of its opposite. They are habits that designers and painters have found helpful. Nobody has shown that they are laws of beauty.
#F2C230Analogous 2#A7C63AAnalogous 3#3FA34DTriad red#D7263DTriad yellow#F4C20DTriad blue#1B5FAAThe main recipes
An analogous scheme takes two to four neighbours, such as yellow, yellow-green and green. It is calm and hard to get wrong. A complementary scheme takes two opposites and gives the most contrast. A split-complementary scheme softens that by swapping one of the opposites for its two neighbours, so blue goes with yellow-orange and red-orange. A triad takes three hues a third of the wheel apart, such as red, yellow and blue. A tetrad takes four, as two complementary pairs. A monochrome scheme uses one hue only, in lighter, darker and greyer versions.
How far to trust them
The recipes come from teachers and theorists, among them Johannes Itten at the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s. They are conventions. Studies of what people actually find pleasing give a simpler picture: on average, people like combinations of similar hues, and they like clear differences in lightness. Strongly contrasting hues are judged striking more often than they are judged harmonious. The recipes also deal only with hue. Two palettes built on the same triad can look elegant or garish depending on how light and how saturated each colour is.
Harmony outside the wheel
Many admired colour traditions do not follow the wheel at all. A Kanchipuram silk sari may set a mustard body against a deep maroon border. Mughal and Rajput painters placed reds, oranges and pinks side by side. West African kente cloth puts gold, green, red and black together in one strip. These combinations are shaped by the dyes that were available, by meaning and by long habit. A useful test for any palette is to look at it in greyscale. If the lights and darks are well spread, the hues usually sit together well.
How to do it
- Pick one main hue that suits the subject.
- For calm, add one or two neighbours on the wheel. For energy, add its opposite or the two hues beside its opposite.
- Make one colour dominant and keep the others to smaller areas.
- Vary lightness and saturation so that no two colours fight at equal strength.
- Check the result in greyscale, then adjust by eye.
Sources and further reading
- Harmony (color) on Wikipedia
- Schloss and Palmer, Aesthetic response to color combinations: preference, harmony, and similarity (2011)
- Handprint: colour wheels
- MDN Web Docs: Color wheel
Original text by the Rang desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Meanings of colour vary from place to place and person to person. If we have something wrong, tell us.