Your Guide To: Color Harmonies

Welcome back to the Coloro Educates series, where we discuss all things color, one topic at a time. Today, we're decoding color harmonies.

Backed by scientists and hailed by creatives, color harmonies help you achieve color combinations that are proven appealing to the eye, ultimately leading to striking designs, top-selling products and happy customers. But what exactly are color harmonies?

The color wheel, invented by Sir Isaac Newton in 1666, remains the basis of color theory to this day. Often introduced to children during art classes, the color wheel is a visual representation of how color harmonies work – and it was the key to unlocking basic color science. When Newton invented the color wheel, he discovered that white light comprises a spectrum of colors. So, the color wheel was a visual representation of this and later became a way to showcase color harmonies.

WGSN’s Head of Color, Urangoo Samba , shares some insight on the importance of color harmonies for designers and brands:

“Color harmonies can reignite existing foundational colors to create newness, excitement and seasonal relevance without reinventing an entire palette and range. Reimagining existing long-term colors with exciting seasonal injections helps to maximize the impact of your key color stories while protecting volume assortments and investment hues.”

?Clearly, color harmonies have a lot to answer for. Not only do they add excitement to collections that may otherwise feel uninspired, they also help maximize resources and maintain brand identity through the consistent use of foundational hues.

?There are six commonly used formulas for color harmonies. Let’s start with the most straightforward, monochromatic.

As the name suggests, a monochromatic color harmony is when only one color – or tints, tones and shades of this single color – is used.

Next, we move on to analogous, where a group of up to three colors adjacent to one another in the color wheel are used.

Then we have the complementary color harmony, where two colors that sit opposite each other on the color wheel are used together.

Moving onto split-complementary: this is a variation of the complementary harmony but uses the colors adjacent to the complementary color.

The penultimate color harmony is triadic. This is where a color scheme is created that is evenly spaced across the color wheel.

Finally, tetradic uses four colors arranged into split-complementary pairs.

Whether applied to textiles, interiors or tech, each harmony has something different to offer. When curating your palette, switch up saturation and lightness levels to create depth and complexity. Consider warm and cool tones and how to create tension while maintaining commerciality.?

And, the next time you buy an accessory, some furniture, a piece of tech or clothing, stop and think: which color harmony is being used? Given that color impacts up to 90% of our purchasing decisions, the chances are the color harmony you see within a product’s design largely influenced your decision-making, whether you were conscious of this or not.?

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