Color harmony

Colour harmony is an extremely broad concept and it can’t be strictly defined. It is something very subtle and fragile, and even the following the design rules isn’t a guarantee that a harmony will be achieved. Generally colour harmony is defined as aesthetically pleasant combination of colours. Harmony creates positive feelings. If it is an unexpected, complicated harmony it can raise joy and amusement, more traditional types of harmony create a feeling of comfort and relaxation. Harmony is what makes an image complete.

An interior with a lack of colour harmony can never feel comfortable and pleasing. Still there are some rules how to create colour harmony.

I think the best teacher to refer to for developing taste and the ability to create harmony is nature. There are countless of colour combinations in nature that can be found by looking at animals, insects, plants, landscapes that change colour at different times of the day, stones etc. All this is a

valuable source of inspiration and learning. Every colour combination in nature is harmonious and perfect. I think it is important for a designer to go out into nature and to view many photographs, because nature can provide unexpected and yet perfect colour harmonies.

Despite all this a designer must for sure know the existing rules of creating harmony, not to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

The 12-segment colour wheel is usually used to define different types of colour harmony. Here are some of them.

Monochromatic: this is the most simple and safe colour harmony, using different tints and shades of the same hue.

Analogous harmony consists of 3 colours situated next to each other on the 12-segment colour wheel, likeblue, green-blue and green.

Two colours situated opposite each other on the colour wheel form a complementary harmony.

By using one base colour and the colours adjacent to its complimentary, split-complimentary harmony is created.

There is a number of variations of those types of harmonies, for example, triad – using the colours that are evenly spaced on the colour wheel, rectangle – using two pairs of complimentary colours, square is a variation of rectangle, where all the four colours are spaced evenly on the colour wheel.