Generate palettes from color harmony relationships
The Color Harmonies tool calculates groups of hues at defined angles from a base color. It turns familiar color-wheel relationships into swatches you can compare, copy and use as starting points for a palette.
What are color harmonies?
Color harmonies are structured combinations based on relative hue positions. They offer a consistent way to find related colors, but they do not prescribe proportions, guarantee contrast or replace testing colors in their intended context.
How the Color Harmonies tool works
Enter a HEX color or choose one with the picker, then select a harmony. The tool rotates the base hue by the angles defined for that pattern and displays the resulting colors as copyable swatches. The dominance control changes the suggested visual proportions without changing the calculated hues.
The available patterns are complementary, analogous, analogous plus complementary, triadic, split complementary, tetradic and square. These are the relationships calculated by the tool.
See how these hue positions are arranged in the Color Wheel.
Choosing a harmony
Analogous colors stay close on the wheel and can support a closely related palette. Complementary and split-complementary patterns introduce hues from opposing regions, providing stronger hue separation.
Triadic, tetradic and square patterns distribute colors across more of the wheel. They provide more distinct hue families to work with, but the appropriate choice depends on the role, proportion and context of each color.
Using harmonies in design
Harmony swatches are useful as candidates that can be refined for a particular design rather than treated as a finished palette.
- Explore accent and supporting hues for an interface, then test their actual contrast and states.
- Compare structured palette directions around an existing brand color.
- Build a set of distinct hue families for illustration or data visualization.