How to determine the color for your logo, corporate identity and website

But what are the colors you should use? Which colors go well together. Not everyone is equally creative. It is therefore useful to know that a lot of research has been done into colors and that there are tricks to choose colors that go well together. In this article, we'll look at the color wheel and how you can use it to choose colors that work well together.

The color wheel

The color wheel consists of 3 elements

1. Primary colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue.
2. Secondary colors: Mixing the primary colors determine the secondary colors. Red and yellow becomes orange. Red and blue becomes purple/violet. Yellow and blue turns green
3. Tertiary colors: this is the mix of secondary color with a primary color. Primary yellow with secondary orange becomes yellow-orange. Primary red with secondary orange becomes red orange Etc...

The color wheel we will be working on consists of all 3 types of colors.

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Complementary colors

Complementary colors are the colors that are opposite each other on this wheel. You can use these complementary colors on a website, for example, to make something stand out. For example, an important text with a link behind it. For example, if you use primary blue, it works well to use secondary orange if you want to highlight something.

Split Complementary colors

In this case, you're using a little more slack. Instead of the color directly opposite the base color, pick the colors right next to the opposite color to add an accent. This reduces the impact or makes it even stronger. For example, with the base color primary blue, you use orange/yellow tertiar and orange/red tertiar.

Analogue colors

Once you have determined the complementary colors to represent the accents, see what the analogous colors are. This is the base color plus the colors on both sides. These three colors also go well together.

Triadic colors

If you want more contrast, you can also find the color combination in an equal triangle. The three colors that are at an equal distance from each other fit together perfectly. You choose one of the three as the base color and the other two as the supporting color.

Tetradic colors

If you need colors even more, you can opt for the square. This makes the use a bit more complex, because in this case we are going to use 4 colors of the wheel. A base and two sets of supporting colors.

The use of shades of colors

Of course, we can still work with shades of colors. We will write a new article about this later.

Tips

There are a number of websites where you can use the color wheel to find matching colors.

Adobe Color Wheel

Sessions Edu color wheel

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