Color Wheel — Build a Harmony From Any Hex Code

Free interactive color wheel and harmony generator — no signup.

A color wheel arranges hues in a circle so the mathematical relationships between them — opposite, adjacent, evenly spaced — become visual ones. This one lets you pick a base color, choose a harmony rule, and read the resulting hex codes as text. Saturation and lightness sliders apply to the whole set, and the URL saves your palette.

Complementary

Two hues 180° apart — the widest gap the wheel allows. Reach for a complement when one element must out-shout everything around it, like a single call-to-action. Keep the ratio lopsided, and never set one as text on the other.

Analogous

The base hue plus its neighbors at ±30°. Analogous sets read as one family rather than a contrast, which suits backgrounds, gradients, and chart series in one category. Nothing stands out, so you still need a borrowed accent for primary actions.

Triadic

Three hues 120° apart. No two are close enough to muddle, so triadic sets stay vivid and balanced — good for playful brands and category color-coding. In product UI, make one hue dominant and confine the rest to icons and tags.

Split-complementary

The base plus the two hues flanking its complement, at 150° and 210°. You get nearly the contrast of a true complement with far less edge vibration, plus a spare hue for secondary accents. The safest answer to "what goes with our brand color?"

Tetradic / square

Four hues 90° apart — two complementary pairs at once. The richest scheme here and the easiest to ruin, because four competing hues have no natural hierarchy. Treat it as a source: one dominant hue, the rest demoted to status colors.

Monochromatic

One hue varied only by lightness, so every marker lands on the same spot. Barely a harmony rule — and what most real interfaces are built from, since a design system needs far more lightness steps than hues.

From a harmony to a full palette

A harmony gives you three or four hues; an interface needs nine to eleven steps of each hue. Take any swatch into the tint and shade generator for a copy-ready ramp, or the color scale generator for its lightness, hue, and chroma axes. For one exact step, lighten or darken a color by a percentage.

Check your combinations for contrast

Harmony is a relationship between hues; legibility is a relationship between lightness values. Two colors 180° apart at the same lightness have almost no contrast, so run every text-on-background pairing through the contrast checker.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is a color wheel?

  A circle of hues in spectral order, where the angle between two colors describes their relationship: opposite is complementary, adjacent is analogous, evenly spaced is triadic or tetradic. Every harmony rule is a fixed angle on that circle.

• What are complementary colors?

  Colors 180° apart on the wheel — #FF6600 and #0099FF, for example. They give the strongest hue contrast available, which suits a single accent against a dominant brand color. Avoid pairing them as text and background: the edge shimmers.

• How do I find colors that go with my brand color?

  Paste your brand hex into the wheel above and start with split-complementary — nearly the punch of a true complement, much less clash. Then switch to monochromatic for the surfaces, borders, and text shades the interface will mostly use.

• Is a color wheel the same as a color picker?

  No. A color picker captures one color and reports its hex, RGB, and HSL. A wheel takes a color you already have and derives others by rotating the hue. Pick first, then build the harmony here.

• How many colors should a palette have?

  Two or three hues is usually the ceiling for an interface: a dominant brand hue, an accent, and maybe one for status colors. What you need many of is steps, not hues — nine to eleven lightness values per hue.

• Does a harmonious palette automatically have readable text?

  No — harmony is about hue, contrast is about lightness, so two harmonious colors can be illegible together. Measure every pairing against 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text with the contrast checker.