Color Harmony

Generate complementary, triadic and analogous schemes from a base color.

The schemes are geometry on the hue wheel. Complementary takes the hue opposite, triadic takes two at 120 degrees, and analogous takes neighbours. They are a starting point rather than a rule — what makes a palette work in practice is usually one dominant colour with a small accent, not equal amounts of two or three.

The caveat is that the wheel these are computed on is HSL, which is a mathematical transform of RGB and not a model of how people perceive colour. Fully saturated yellow and fully saturated blue have wildly different perceived lightness at identical HSL lightness values, so a scheme that is balanced by the numbers can look badly unbalanced on screen.