Color Harmony Explorer
Pick a base color and explore complementary, analogous, triadic, and more harmonies. Click any swatch to copy its HEX.
Color Harmony Explorer
Color Harmony generates complementary, analogous, triadic, split-complementary and tetradic schemes from any base colour.
How to use it
- Pick a base colour.
- Read each harmony scheme generated from it.
- Copy the colours you want to use.
What each relationship is
Harmonies are defined by angles on the colour wheel. Complementary is the colour directly opposite, 180 degrees away, which gives maximum contrast and tension. Analogous takes neighbours within about 30 degrees, which is calm and cohesive because the colours share a family.
Triadic takes three colours 120 degrees apart, giving vibrancy while staying balanced. Split-complementary takes the two neighbours of the complement instead of the complement itself, keeping most of the contrast with less harshness, which is why it is often the safer choice for interfaces.
When it helps
- Building a palette from a single brand colour.
- Finding an accent colour that will not fight the primary.
- Generating chart colours that stay distinguishable.
- Getting out of a palette rut with a principled starting point.
Common mistakes
- Using harmony colours at equal weight. Most good palettes are dominated by one colour with the others used sparingly.
- Treating the wheel as the final answer. Harmonies are a starting point and still need contrast checking against your backgrounds.
- Forgetting accessibility. A theoretically harmonious pair can still fail contrast requirements badly.
