Color Wheel & Palettes
Free online tool
A color wheel arranges hues in a circle so you can see which colors work together: opposites are complementary, neighbors are analogous, and evenly spaced points form triads and squares. Pick a base color below and the wheel shows its harmonies with HEX, RGB and HSL codes you can copy.
Your palette
A harmony is a fixed geometric relationship on the wheel. Because the angles stay the same wherever the base color sits, you can turn a scheme until it fits your brand, photo or room and it still holds together.
Two hues directly opposite each other. This is the strongest contrast the wheel offers, so the pair pulls the eye: a call-to-action button on a contrasting background, a team logo, a poster headline. Use one color for most of the area and the other sparingly.
The base color and its two neighbors. Contrast is low and the result feels calm and natural, like the reds and oranges of a sunset or the greens of a forest. Add a neutral or a darker shade so the palette does not look flat.
Instead of the direct opposite, take the two hues on either side of it. You keep most of the energy of a complementary pair with less tension, which makes it a forgiving choice for illustrations, packaging and slides.
Three hues evenly spaced around the circle. Bright and balanced; the red, yellow and blue primaries of the painter’s wheel form a triad. If the result feels loud, lower the saturation of two of the three colors.
Four hues evenly spaced, which gives you two complementary pairs. It is the richest scheme on this page, so let one color lead and keep the other three for details and accents.
A single hue in several saturation and brightness steps. It is always cohesive, reads well in interfaces and charts, and suits a brand that owns one color.
Screens mix light, so digital design uses the RGB wheel. Red, green and blue are its primaries and opposite colors add up to white light: red sits across from cyan, green across from magenta and blue across from yellow. HEX codes, CSS and design tools all work in this model, and it is the wheel the Color Wheel & Palettes app uses.
Paint mixes pigment, and art classes teach the older red, yellow and blue (RYB) wheel. On it red is opposite green, yellow is opposite violet and blue is opposite orange. If you are planning a painting, a room or an outfit, switch the tool to Painter’s (RYB): it rearranges the hues so the harmonies match what you learned, and still gives you screen-ready HEX values.
Neither wheel is wrong. They describe different materials, so choose the one that matches where your colors will end up.
The wheel divides roughly in half by temperature. Reds, oranges and yellows feel warm and seem to come toward the viewer; greens, blues and violets feel cool and recede. A palette with one warm accent among cool colors, or the reverse, usually looks deliberate.
Tints, shades and tones change a color without changing its hue. A tint adds white: drag the marker toward the center or lower Saturation. A shade adds black: lower Brightness. A tone adds grey, which is both at once. The Monochromatic harmony builds these steps for you.
Before colors go into a website or app, check text contrast with the WCAG contrast checker, and for smooth blends between palette colors try the gradient generator.
Isaac Newton bent the spectrum into a circle in Opticks (1704), which made it possible to talk about colors as neighbors and opposites. Painters later settled on the 12-part red, yellow and blue wheel that Johannes Itten taught at the Bauhaus: three primaries, three secondaries mixed from them, and six tertiaries in between. Digital tools replaced pigment primaries with light, but the idea of reading harmony from angles on a circle has not changed.
iPhone and iPad
Color Wheel & Palettes for iPhone and iPad uses the same digital wheel and the same harmony angles as the Digital (RGB) mode on this page, so a palette you build here looks the same in the app. It adds what a browser tab cannot:
More about the Color Wheel app for iPhone.
Questions
On a digital (RGB) color wheel, red’s complement is cyan (#00FFFF): the two sit 180° apart and together make white light. On a painter’s (RYB) wheel, red’s complement is green. Switch the wheel mode above to compare both.
A traditional painter’s wheel has 12: three primaries (red, yellow, blue), three secondaries (orange, green, violet) and six tertiaries between them. A digital wheel like this one is continuous, with 360 degrees of hue, so every hue has a place.
Triadic uses three hues 120° apart and feels balanced and lively. Tetradic, or square, uses four hues 90° apart, which is two complementary pairs. It gives the most variety, so let one color lead and use the others as accents.
Yes. All six harmonies, both wheel modes, the HEX, RGB and HSL codes and the palette link are free in any browser, with no account. The Color Wheel & Palettes app is free to download; its Pro upgrade adds extras such as unlimited saved palettes and file export.
Copy palette link stores the base color, harmony and wheel mode in the address, so anyone who opens it sees the same palette. To keep a library of palettes, sync them with iCloud and export files, save them in the Color Wheel & Palettes app.
Download Color Wheel & Palettes and build harmonies, gradients, accessible contrast pairs, and export-ready colors from your iPhone or iPad.
