The color wheel
A color wheel puts every hue in a circle. Colors next to each other look related and calm together. Colors on opposite sides are as different as they get, so they make each other stand out.
Drag any handle on the wheel and the others follow, keeping the same pattern. The slider underneath makes the whole wheel lighter or darker.
Three different wheels
RGB is your screen's wheel, built from red, green and blue light. Here the opposite of red is cyan.
RYB is the painter's wheel you may know from school, with red, yellow and blue as the main colors. Here the opposite of red is green. On screen it's an approximation.
OKLCH is arranged by eye: every color on it looks equally light, and equal steps around the circle look equally different. Its colors are softer, but its harmonies are the most balanced.
The rules
- Complementary: two opposite colors. Bold and high-energy.
- Analogous: neighbors on the wheel. Calm and natural, like a sunset or a forest.
- Triadic: three colors evenly spaced. Lively but balanced.
- Split complementary: one color plus the two on either side of its opposite. Strong contrast with less tension.
- Tetradic and Square: four colors. Rich, and works best when one of them leads.
- Compound: a mix of close and opposite colors, a little softer.
- Monochromatic: one hue in lighter, darker and softer versions. Always safe, always calm.
Using a palette
The rules are a starting point, not a law. A handy recipe: use one color for most of the design, a second for support, and a third only as a small accent, roughly 60, 30 and 10 percent.
As text on your background shows each color as text on your own background, so you can see at a glance which ones are readable. Tints & shades gives lighter and darker versions of your color for hover states, borders and backgrounds.
Taking it with you
Click any color in the palette to make it your foreground color; it follows you to the other tools.
The code panel copies the whole palette as CSS variables, SCSS, JSON or a Tailwind config, ready to paste into your project.