eFrog Digital Design |

Some people may have a natural knack for knowing and understanding what colour combinations work. Others don’t. So if you’re that person who only wears black to avoid looking like a christmas tree, or you’re stuck trying to come up with a colour palette for your lounge or website – be joyful that by learning a few colour basics, and with the help of some cool apps and resources, you can easily come up with thousands of colour palettes that work.

First things first though. The colour wheel:

In this post we’ll talk about Analogous and Monochromatic colours:

I know the word “analogous” and “monochromatic” seem like a bit of a pretentious mouthful, but really they are probably the easiest and safest ways to match colours and create a harmonious palette – whether its for your new WordPress theme customization, website design, or when you are picking clothes to wear in the morning.

Analogous colours
This is simply means picking three colours that are alongside one another in a 12 part colour wheel. So if we use the colour wheel example below, these would be analogous colours:

The image above uses hues of a similar brightness. While this is strictly accurate, you might get a more dynamic palette by altering the darkness/lightness of one or two of the colours.

It’s important to note, that analogous colours work best when one of the colours are dominant. Slitting the palette into thirds won’t work well. It would be better to have one colour dominant, another secondary, and another as an accent. Although this depends on the design – play around.

Example:

Monochromatic colours
Perhaps even simpler than the analogous method, these are uses a single colour as a base, and any other colours that are introduced are just various shades of that same colour.

Example:

To practice and play around with these colour ideas, here are some online tools that might serve as some inspiration:
Colorspire Wheel
Color Scheme Designer