One of the simplest ways to create a professional looking color scheme is to take a few tones, tints, and shades of a given color (avoiding the pure hue), and then add in another pure hue (or close to pure) that’s at least three spaces away on the color wheel (part of a tetradic, triatic, or split-complementary color scheme) as an accent color. This adds visual interest to your color scheme while still retaining a sense of balance.

If you combine two primary colors with each other, you get a so-called secondary color. If you mix red and blue, you get violet, yellow and red become orange, blue and yellow become green. If you mix all the primary colors together, you get black.

The green color was created by analyzing the way the rods and cones in our eyes are stimulated by different wavelengths of light. The company found that the human eye is most sensitive to light at a wavelength of 555 nanometers—a bright green.

The major color schemes in art are analogous, complementary, split-complementary, triadic, tetradic and monochromatic. These color schemes utilize colors at certain locations on the color wheel.

Here are some of our favorite two-color combinations. Yellow and Blue: Playful and Authoritative. Black and Orange: Lively and Powerful. Maroon and Peach: Elegant and Tranquil. Deep Purple and Blue: Serene and Dependable. Navy and Orange: Entertaining yet Credible.

Creating a color palette is an essential early step in presenting your brand to the world, because the colors you choose visually tell the story of your brand’s persona and aesthetic. Color palettes make it easy to quickly replicate your brand’s look when creating your website, digital assets, social media posts, and business cards.

Color is an integral element of good design. With so much psychology and emotions attached to the hues you choose, it can be tricky to curate your color palette when designing.

Color gradients, or color transitions, are defined as a gradual blending from one color to another. This blending can occur between colors of the same tone (from light blue to navy blue), colors of two different tones (from blue to yellow), or even between more than two colors (from blue to purple to red to orange).

A color trend is a direction. It's a developing awareness or an emerging preference for a color or several colors. Therefore, a color trend can change the way we think about a color and how we purchase consumer goods.

Use the eyedropper or loupe tool to “pick up” any color and copy/paste the hexadecimal color number into the Color Picker color field (make sure you include the hash symbol with the number, e.g. #DFDFFF is the light purple-blue).