Triadic colors
Triadic colors are three hues spaced evenly around a color wheel, forming the vertices of an equilateral triangle.
Design for Developers
A triadic color scheme uses three colors evenly spaced around the color wheel.
- How it is used
- Builds harmonious website and web-app palettes, assigning one color as primary and two as accents.
- How deep it goes
- Defines even color-wheel spacing and gives hierarchy, proportion, shade, tint, and accessibility guidance without implementation code.
- Examples
- Uses red-yellow-blue, purple-orange-green, and the 60:30:10 distribution as practical palette examples.
- What you can do after
- Apply triadic palettes by selecting a dominant color, limiting accents, adjusting shades and tints, and testing accessible contrast.
Web Design Playground
Three colors spaced evenly around the color wheel, forming a balanced high-harmony color relationship.
- How it is used
- Uses evenly spaced hues to organize backgrounds, content, navigation, borders, and accents into a harmonious web palette.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the 120-degree HSL relationship and gives a practical allocation of three colors across page elements.
- Examples
- Demonstrates a red HSL triad and points to a website using triadic colors for backgrounds and text.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via the Color Scheme Calculator to generate triadic RGB and HSL color values from an initial color.
Web Design Playground, Second Edition
A triadic color scheme uses three colors whose hues are equally spaced around the color wheel.
- How it is used
- Deploys three evenly spaced hues to organize page backgrounds, content, navigation, borders, and accents.
- How deep it goes
- Explains the 120-degree HSL rule, color-role assignments, and a red example, then delegates calculation to a tool.
- Examples
- Demonstrates red with HSL hues 0, 120, and 240 degrees and assigns three colors to page-design roles.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via the Web Design Playground Color Scheme Calculator to generate RGB, rgb(), and HSL values.
Read how Web Design Playground, Second Edition explains triadic colors →
Related concepts
- color wheeluses · A color wheel is a circular arrangement of hues that represents relationships such as adjacency, opposition, and harmony.
- HSL methoduses · The HSL method represents colors using hue, saturation, and lightness within a color model or notation system.
- CSSuses · CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a stylesheet language for specifying the presentation and layout of structured documents and user interfaces.
- 60:30:10 ruleconfigured by · The 60:30:10 rule is a color-allocation guideline that assigns approximately 60 percent, 30 percent, and 10 percent of a composition to primary, secondary, and accent color roles.
- degreesmeasures · A degree is a unit of angular measurement equal to one three-hundred-sixtieth of a full revolution.
- color palettekind of · A selected set of colors intended for coordinated use in visual design or representation.
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