Color can be very tricky. Because the color picker offers millions of possible values, it can either be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Hue, which is the color itself.
Saturation is the intensity of the hue. The more saturated the hue, the more vivid. The less saturated the hue, the duller it is.
Value is the brightness of a hue. The more that hue is mixed with white, the brighter it becomes. And the more it’s mixed with black, the darker it becomes.
On one side, are cool colors: purple, blue, and green.
On the other side, are warm colors: red, orange, and yellow.
The color wheel is also composed of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. There are 3 primary colors: red, yellow and blue.
There are also 3 secondary colors: green, orange, purple. These are created by mixing two primary colors together.
And there are 6 tertiary colors: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-purple, and red-purple. These are created by mixing primary and secondary colors.
When it comes to color, harmony matters. Color harmony is especially useful if you’re the one responsible to create a color palette for a new product.
You might have heard of terms like monochromatic, complementary, or triadic. These are some of the most useful color harmony rules.
Monochromatic is a color harmony rule where your color palette consists of only one hue. For example, the yellow at the top is the base hue. The colors beneath it are based on that same hue, but with different saturation and brightness values.
Another useful color harmony is complementary. These are the two hues that are visual opposites on the color wheel like yellow and purple. A great example of a complementary logo is the Krispy Kreme Doughnuts logo because red and green are on opposite sides of the wheel.
Finally, there is triadic which are the colors that are equidistant from each other on the color wheel. Here are a few examples on the color wheel, purple, orange, green, or blue, yellow, red, etc. Here is a famous example of a triadic logo: Burger King’s.
See how all three of these colors play off of each other? That’s color harmony in action.
There are a more color harmony rules out there. Color.adobe.com is a great tool to view and create these color schemes.
