Design Nomenclature / Color

Color harmony

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

This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.

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