How to build colours that work together: tints, shades and tones, lighter versions that stay on hue, warm and cool, and whether harmony rules hold up.
Building a paletteContrast and accessibility
A brand palette works when every colour has a job. On screens, neutrals cover most of the page and your brand colour marks what people click. Here's where the 60-30-10 rule really comes from, how many colours you need, and why your brand colour may fail as text.
15 min read
Building a palette
A tint is a colour plus white, a shade is a colour plus black, and a tone is a colour plus grey. The square in your colour picker is built from exactly those three mixes. Here's how to read it, why the words keep changing meaning, and why a tint can drift off hue.
12 min read
How we see colourBuilding a palette
Orange is the warmest hue and blue the coolest, and people everywhere agree on that. Everything in between is a comparison. Here's where research puts the line, why green and purple sit on it, and what that means for your palette.
11 min read
HistoryBuilding a palette
The colour wheel wasn't invented once. Newton published a wheel of light in 1704, painters started a red, yellow and blue wheel in 1708, and the two still disagree. That's why your design tools can give different complementary colours.
12 min read
Building a palette
Why light blue looks purple, and how to lighten a colour without changing its hue in Canva or Figma. Pale blues drift towards lavender for two separate reasons, your eyes and some older colour maths, and the fix is to steer the hue as you lighten, then check by eye.
12 min read
Building a palette
Complementary, analogous and triadic schemes are a good way to find candidate colours, but the experiments say they don't predict which pairs look good. Here's what two major studies found, why they disagree about complementary colours, and what to check instead.
16 min read