Understanding color wheel

(Image from Nancy Duarte, slide:ology)

The color wheel helps you visualize the relationships between colors.

The wheel is divided into pie slices which have the following components:

• hue (true color): On the wheel above, the hue is four rings out of the center.
• tints: correspond to the colors toward the center of the wheel (= hue + white color)
• shades: corresponds to the ring of colors on the outside of the hue ( = hue + black color)

Defining the basics for choosing colors

1. Monochromatic: Variations of the same color.

2. Analogous: colors that are touching in the wheel creates narrow harmonious color scheme.

3. Complementary: Colors from the opposite ends of the wheel provide the most contrast.

(Image from Nancy Duarte, slide:ology)

4. Split Complementary: A variation of the complementary scheme that uses two colors on either side of a directly complementary color. These colors have high visual contrast but with less visual tension than purely complementary colors.

5. Triadic: Three colors equally spaced around the color wheel create vivid visual interest.

6. Tetradic: Two pairs of complementary colors. This scheme is popular because it offers strong visual contrast while retaining harmony.

(Image from Nancy Duarte, slide:ology)

colortools: R package for creating easily color schemes in R

The excellent R package colortools developed by Gaston Sanchez is an easy to use solution for generating color schemes in R.

install.packages("colortools")

library(colortools)

wheel("darkblue", num = 12)

##  [1] "#00008B" "#46008B" "#8B008B" "#8B0046" "#8B0000" "#8B4500" "#8B8B00"
##  [8] "#468B00" "#008B00" "#008B45" "#008B8B" "#00468B"

analogous("darkblue")

## [1] "#00008B" "#46008B" "#00468B"

complementary("steelblue")

## [1] "#4682B4" "#B47846"

splitComp("steelblue")

## [1] "#4682B4" "#B4464B" "#B4AF46"

tetradic("steelblue")

## [1] "#4682B4" "#7846B4" "#B47846" "#82B446"

square("steelblue")

## [1] "#4682B4" "#AF46B4" "#B47846" "#4BB446"

sequential("steelblue")

##  [1] "#B4B4B4FF" "#ABB0B4FF" "#A2ACB4FF" "#99A8B4FF" "#90A4B4FF"
##  [6] "#87A0B4FF" "#7E9BB4FF" "#7597B4FF" "#6C93B4FF" "#638FB4FF"
## [11] "#5A8BB4FF" "#5187B4FF" "#4883B4FF" "#3F7FB4FF" "#367BB4FF"
## [16] "#2D77B4FF" "#2473B4FF" "#1B6EB4FF" "#126AB4FF" "#0966B4FF"
## [21] "#0062B4FF"

Design your color scheme online

The online tool Colors Scheme Designer can be used:

Read more

• slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations (by Nancy Duarte)
• R package colortools by Gaston Sanchez.

Infos

This analysis has been performed using R software (ver. 3.2.3) and colortools (ver. 0.1.5)