Design Nomenclature / Color

Color harmony

Also called colour harmony, color scheme, colour scheme, palette theory

The doctrine that certain hue relations are inherently agreeable, read off fixed angles on a wheel: complementary, analogous, triadic, tetradic. The relations are real geometry. The pleasure they are said to guarantee is not — value and proportion decide whether a palette works, and the wheel knows about neither.

A two-column comparison headed 'what the wheel does not measure: value and proportion'. Correct by the wheel — exact complements, equal areas, equal value — obeys the scheme completely and sits there vibrating, with nothing to look at first. Wrong by the wheel — the same two hues, one given a tenth of the area and pulled apart in value — breaks the scheme and reads as a picture.

In practice

Every scheme on the wheel can be made to look terrible, and every palette that works can be reverse-engineered into one afterwards. Useful for generating candidates, useless for judging them. Composition's harmony is a different word about relation between parts, and shares no method with this.

Not to be confused with

How this term connects

AnalogousComplementaryContrast of extensionHarmonyMonochromaticTetradicTriadicValueColor harmony
Related Confused with