Tetradic: Take four colors that are two sets of complementary pairs (e.g., orange/yellow/blue/violet) and choose one dominant color.

It’s easier to make visually appealing designs with this scheme than with a complementary scheme. These colors may not be vibrant, but the scheme can be as it maintains harmony and high contrast. Triadic: Take three equally distant colors on the color wheel (i.e., 120° apart: e.g., red/blue/yellow). Split-Complementary (or Compound Harmony): Add colors from either side of your complementary color pair to soften the contrast. A variant is to mix white with these to form a “high-key” analogous color scheme (e.g., flames).Ĭomplementary: Use “opposite color” pairs-e.g., blue/yellow-to maximize contrast. Monochromatic: Take one hue and create other elements from different shades and tints of it.Īnalogous: Use three colors located beside one another on the color wheel (e.g., orange, yellow-orange and yellow to show sunlight). When starting your design process, you can consider using any of these main color schemes: Just as you need to place images and other elements in visual design strategically, your color choices should optimize your users’ experience in attractive interfaces with high usability. In screen design, designers use the additive color model, where red, green and blue are the primary colors. Use a Color Scheme and Color Temperature for Design Harmony In user experience (UX) design, you need a firm grasp of color theory to craft harmonious, meaningful designs for your users. Saturation, also known as chroma or intensity, refers to the purity and vividness of a color, ranging from fully saturated (vibrant) to desaturated (grayed). Value represents a color's relative lightness or darkness or grayscale and it’s crucial for creating contrast and depth in visual art. Hue is the attribute of color that distinguishes it as red, blue, green or any other specific color on the color wheel.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0 Tertiary (or intermediate-mixes of primary and secondary colors). By systematically categorizing colors, he defined three groups: Newton understood colors as human perceptions -not absolute qualities-of wavelengths of light. Sir Isaac Newton established color theory when he invented the color wheel in 1666.

Paul Gauguin, Famous post-Impressionist painter “Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.”

Color wheel color picker photoshop