Color scheme

Choice of colors used in design

In color theory, a color scheme is a combination of 2 or more colors used in aesthetic or practical design. Aesthetic color schemes are used to create style and appeal. Colors that create a harmonious feeling when viewed together are often used together in aesthetic color schemes. Practical color schemes are used to inhibit or facilitate color tasks, such as camouflage color schemes or high visibility color schemes. Qualitative and quantitative color schemes are used to encode unordered categorical data and ordered data, respectively. Color schemes are often described in terms of logical combinations of colors on a color wheel or within a color space.

Harmonious color schemes are designed to accomplish an aesthetic color task and enhance color harmony. They do not represent any underlying variable. The color scheme of a logo is typically purely aesthetic. A color scheme in marketing is referred to as a trade dress and can sometimes be protected by trademark or trade dress laws, as is the pink color of Owens Corning fiberglass.

Any color that lacks strong chromatic content is said to be unsaturated, achromatic, or near neutral. Pure achromatic colors include black, white, all grays and beiges; near neutrals include browns, tans, pastels, and darker colors. Near neutrals can be of any hue or lightness. For example, the "Achromatic" use of a white background with black text is an example of a basic and commonly default color scheme in web design. Neutrals are obtained by mixing pure colors with white, black or gray, or by mixing two complementary colors. In color theory, neutral colors are colors easily modified by adjacent more saturated colors and they appear to take on the hue complementary to the saturated color. Next to a bright red couch, a gray wall will appear distinctly greenish. Black and white have long been known to combine well with almost any other colors; black decreases the apparent saturation or brightness of colors paired with it, and white shows off all hues to equal effect.

Monochromatic color schemes may contain all the colors (tints, tones, and shades) of a single hue, i. e. the base hue modified by the addition of black, gray and white. As a result, the energy is more subtle and peaceful due to a lack of contrast of hue.

A complementary color scheme comprises two colors that combine to form gray, i. e. they are on opposite sides of the color wheel. Fully saturated complementary colors maximize color contrast. A split complementary (also called compound harmony) color scheme comprises three colors, namely a base color and two colors that are 150 degrees and 210 degrees apart from the base color. The split complementary color scheme has the same sharp visual contrast as the complementary color scheme but has less pressure.

Analogous color schemes (also called dominance harmony) are groups of colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel, with one being the dominant color, which tends to be a primary or secondary color, and two on either side complementing, which tend to be tertiary. A analogous color scheme tends to have a consistent temperature, comprising only warm or only cool colors. An analogous color scheme creates a rich, semi monochromatic look. However, the scheme also lacks contrast and is less vibrant than complementary schemes. Red, reddish orange, orange, yellow orange is one example of a set of analogous colors. An accented analogous color scheme adds the complementary color of an analogous color scheme as the accent color, used to create a dominant color grouping of three similar colors accented with the direct complement (or the near complement) of one of them. The complementary accent color creates an interesting contrast against the dominant color grouping. This scheme is frequently used to put a warm accent color with a cool analogous color palette, or a cool accent color with a warm palette.

The triadic color scheme is a three color combination consisting of base color and two colors that are 120 degrees and 240 degrees apart from the base color. Triadic color schemes tend to be quite vibrant. Even when using pale or unsaturated versions of hues, it offers a higher degree of contrast while also retaining the color harmony. This scheme is trendy among artists because it provides sharp visual contrast while maintaining balance, and color richness. The triadic scheme is not as contrasting as the complementary scheme, but it is easier to accomplish balance and harmony with these colors.

The tetradic (also called double complementary) color scheme is considered the richest because it uses four colors arranged into two complementary color pairs. This scheme is hard to harmonize and requires a color to dominate or subdue the colors; if all four colors are used in equal amounts, the color scheme may look unbalanced. The rectangle color scheme is a four color combination consisting of a base color and three colors that are 60 degrees, 180 degrees, and 240 degrees apart from the base color. Rectangle color schemes work best when one color is dominant. The square color scheme is a four color combination consisting of a base color and three colors that are 90 degrees apart from the base color. Square color schemes are rich in color and offer variations.

This method was discovered in 2017. The wave method of building harmonious color palette based on the relationship of color and acoustic waves and the concept of consonance in music theory. Additional colors are selected to the base color depending on the wavelength ratio. This ratio must satisfy the concept of consonance in music theory.

Practical color schemes combine colors outside typical aesthetic media and context for purely practical reasons, generally focusing on maximizing or minimizing contrast, instead of color harmony. The most common practical color scheme is black and white, which generally maximizes contrast. This may be used for black text on a white background or prison uniforms. Enhancing contrast against a background motivates some practical color schemes, such as high visibility color schemes, while inhibiting contrast against a background motivates others, as in camouflage.

Qualitative color schemes represent categorical variables, where the possible values of the variable are discrete and unordered. An example of a categorical variable is U. S. states, which has 50 unordered values. A qualitative color scheme is generally also called a color code. Generally, the number of colors in a qualitative color scheme is equal to the number of possible values for the categorical variable, where each value is encoded to one color. However, the number of total colors can be decreased by encoding each value with multiple colors, as in the 25 pair color code, which encodes 25 values using only 10 colors, by assigning each value a color each from group A and group B, each consisting of 5 colors. A qualitative color scheme can be designed similarly to a harmonious color scheme. However, the goal of a qualitative color scheme is to solve a comparative color task rather than an aesthetic color task, so enhancing color difference between the colors in the color scheme is generally more important than color harmony.

Bivariate or trivariate schemes use two or three orthogonal sequential schemes to represent separate (but usually related) variables, with the various blended colors representing different combinations of values. This scheme tends to work best when the hues for each axis are primary colors: RGB on a black background, CMY on a white background, so that the mixed colors are as clear as possible. When crafted well, and with advantageous geography (in which the variables tend to have broadly consistent patterns), these color schemes are very effective at visualizing correlations and other patterns between the variables. In other situations, they can produce a seemingly random confusion of color.

Connotative color schemes use colors that reference a specific cultural meaning. Red and green color schemes are connotative of Christmas. In some countries, a red, white and blue color scheme connotes the Flag of the United States. Even the ubiquitous Traffic light color scheme (red, yellow, green) that was originally a qualitative color scheme, has transformed into a connotative color scheme as "red means stop" and "green means go" have solidified in culture, and through their meaning have been adopted in non transportation related encoding like the Traffic Light Protocol or stop light parties.

In hotel room designs, the relationship between preferences of color schemes and gender was detected. Male guests tend to prefer masculine color schemes, while female guests favor feminine color schemes.