Color Schemes

By analyzing the color wheel, we can come up with pleasing color combinations. People tend to describe red, yellow and orange as warm and blue, green and purple as cool.

Some Vocabulary

Complementary colors are two colors directly across from each other on the color wheel. For example, blue and orange. Complements can cause a vibrating effect. When using a complementary color scheme, consider which color will be the dominant one, so that there is either a warm or cold effect.

Triads are created from any three hues equally spaced around the color wheel. There is plenty of room to make contrasts and balance warm and cold colors with this scheme.

Split or soft complements are achieved when a base color is supplemented with two colors, placed identically on both sides of its complement. This tends to be an energetic color scheme, but easier on the eyes than the complementary one.

Analogous color schemes are created with any three adjacent colors. This is an elegant combination that is uniformly warm or cold.

Tip: Check out the resources section for a link to a great tool that generates all of these color schemes!