Tetrad combinations are made up of four hues equal distance from one another, forming a square or rectangle on the color wheel.
About Adjacent Colors on the Color Wheel
On the color wheel, colors that are located next to each other are called adjacent colors. In graphic design, adjacent colors are good choices to use together because they harmonize with one another and they work well together.
For example, the adjacent colors green, yellow-green and yellow harmonize with each other. So do purple and reddish-purple and red. Each adjacent color has a little touch of the other colors. The green has yellow in it, and purple has a touch of red.
Small color wheels don’t show all the intermediate color shades. A too-basic-for-designers color wheel shows yellow and red as adjacent colors, but if you expand the wheel, you’ll see the orange colors that come between them.
Analogous Color Harmony
Of the several types of color harmonies, analogous harmony uses three to five shades of adjacent colors. The trio of red, red-orange and orange is considered an analogous harmonizing trio of adjacent colors. The selection of red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange and yellow is also an analogous harmony. Analogous harmonies are made of colors that sit next to one another on the color wheel.
Harmonizing color schemes are simple, but they can make a strong impression in graphic designs. There are 12 basic 3-color harmonizing color schemes:
- Red, red-orange and orange
- Red-orange, orange and yellow-orange
- Orange, yellow-orange and yellow
- Yellow-orange, yellow and yellow-green
- Yellow, yellow-green and green
- Yellow-green, green, blue-green
- Green, blue-green and blue
- Blue-green, blue and purple
- Blue, blue-purple and purple
- Blue-purple, purple and red-purple
- Purple, red-purple and red
- Red-purple, red and red-orange
A color wheel is simply a jumping-off tool. These simple color schemes only give you a start on a design. Once you find the harmonizing color scheme that works for your design, you’ll spend time looking at charts that may contain hundreds of ink colors (for print) or web colors (for websites) to select just the right shade or tint of the basic color to use in your design.
Trust your design instincts to pick the shade that looks right to you. Stay away from using your adjacent colors at the same brightness levels though. Usually dialing the intensity of one or more of the colors back works better in design.
Analogous color scheme
Analogous color schemes use colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. They usually match well to create serene and comfortable ambience. When choosing, pick one color to dominate, a second to support. The third color is used as an accent.
Basic Techniques for combining colors
Complementary color schemes use colors that are opposite to each other on the color wheel. The opposing colors create maximum contrast and stability. The high contrast of complementary colors creates a vibrant look. This color scheme is tricky to use in large doses, but will work when you want something to stand out.
Basic Techniques for combining colors
A split-complementary color arrangement results from one color paired with two colors on either side of the original color’s direct complement creating a scheme containing three colors.
Building the Munsell Color Wheel
The Munsell color order system defines hue attributes as actual colors and establishes five principal hues. These principal hues are Red (R), Yellow (Y), Green (G), Blue (B) and Purple (P) and are equally spaced in clockwise order around a color circle or wheel. These principal hues are separated by five intermediate or mixture colors. The intermediate hues are defined as Yellow Red (YR), Green Yellow (GY), Blue Green (BG), Purple Blue (PB), and Red Purple (RP). The color wheel is measured off in one hundred compass points resulting in 100 steps on the hue circle. Each of the primary and intermediate colors are allocated a range of ten degrees on the color circle and are located at the mid-point of this segment. In Munsell notation, primary Yellow is identified as 5Y and is at the midpoint of its segment. 2.5Y indicates yellow progressing toward Yellow Red with 7.5Y transitioning toward Green Yellow. 10Y is the end point of the Yellow segment, positioned equally between the primary Yellow (5Y) and intermediate Green Yellow (5GY). This notation concept results in forty standard hue circle divisions. In Munsell notation, Orange is defined as Yellow Red. We depict the Munsell hue circle or color wheel below in Figure #1.
Figure #1: The Munsell hue wheel divided into forty circle divisions.
Two Color Harmony Types with Visual Analytics Examples
The Munsell color notation system is designed so that each color has a logical relationship to all other colors. This is depicted on the color wheel in Figure #1. As we noted previously, this concept is called color harmony. Two colors on opposite sides of the hue wheel are called a complementary color harmony. Three colors adjacent to each other are defined as analogous color harmony. We will describe each of these color harmonies with visual analytics examples below.
What is Complementary Color Harmony?
Two colors on opposite sides of the hue wheel are called complementary colors. For 5G (Green), the complementary color in Munsell notation would be 5RP (Red Purple). Combining 5G with 5RP results in the 5N neutral Gray color at the center of the Munsell hue wheel shown in Figure #1. We apply the 5G and 5RP complementary harmony to a visual analytics example of a three-dimensional stacked area chart in Figure #2.
Figure #2: The Munsell Complementary color harmony of 5G and 5RP applied to a three-dimensional stacked area chart.
What is Analogous Color Harmony?
Three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel define an analogous harmony. We can combine 5B (Blue), 5BG (Blue Green), and 5G (Green) to produce an adjacent color scheme on the Munsell color wheel. We apply this result to a three dimensional bar chart in Figure #3 below.
Figure #3: The Munsell Analogous color harmony of 5B, 5BG and 5G applied to a three-dimensional bar chart
Summary
In this short discussion, we have shown how to build a color wheel from the Munsell color order system. We then demonstrated how each color on the wheel has a logical relationship to all other colors to create color harmony. We highlighted the complementary and analogous color harmonies and demonstrated a visual analytics example for each case. There are many other color harmonies that can be explored and applied to color selection. If you would like to explore this topic further, please examine Chapter 4: Defining Color Harmony of my book on, “Applying Color Theory to Digital Media and Visualization” from CRC Press.
About the Author
Theresa-Marie Rhyne is an expert in the field of computer-generated visualization and a consultant who specializes in applying artistic color theories to visualization and digital media. She has consulted with the Stanford University Visualization Group on a color suggestion prototype system, the Center for Visualization at the University of California at Davis and the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah on applying color theory to ensemble data visualization. Follow the link for more information on her book: “Applying Color Theory to Digital Media and Visualization” is available from CRC Press.
Posted by Theresa-Marie Rhyne.
