Choosing the right colors is key to a successful design. But with such a vast spectrum of colors at your fingertips, how do you make the right color choices? Enter the color wheel — a useful tool for crafting the right color palette for every mood and style.
In this Chart, we share our vision of a tetradic color wheel – developed with help from designers and color experts. We use a visual approach to introduce you to various four-color palettes to work with using color charts while also taking into account factors such as color temperature, tint, shade, tone, and saturation.
To learn more about the qualities and dimensions of colors, check out our Color Wheel Chart on Hues, Tints, and Schemes.
Now, let’s jump right in!
What’s A Tetradic Color Scheme?
Tetradic schemes are based on two complementary pairs of color, like green and red with blue and yellow.
This four-color palette can either form a rectangle on the color wheel, as you can see in our Chart, where the color is positioned relatively close like in analogous or triadic color schemes, or:
A square if the four colors are equally placed around the wheel, similar to a double complementary scheme.
Tetradic schemes offer flexibility in terms of color choices, and create high contrast, tension and depth in your composition. However, balancing two pairs of contrasting colors can be challenging.
To avoid overwhelming your viewer, you have to be cautious in your overall design approach. For most designs, such a scheme works best if one color is dominant. If you let all colors be dominant, the final result may feel too busy or chaotic.
What’s In this Chart?
Our main color wheel shows 16 colors drawn in a way that makes it easy for you to spot tetradic schemes in a single glance.
Remember to always pay close attention to balancing the color temperature of your design. Lucky for you, our Chart also shows side-by-side lists of warm and cool colors to help you create the perfect color harmony for yourself:
A Color Palette
Guess what? Our Chart also comes with a 16-color palette to help you pick out colors for your own design.
This palette shows gradients from tints to tones, giving you an easy visual reference point for the color combination used in our Chart.
Separate Columns for Hue, Tint, Shade and Saturation
To help you experiment with visual effects in design, we have also inserted separate columns for tint, tone, shade and saturation. This feature gives you a deeper understanding of how colors vary within a tetradic scheme, and how you can make the most of them.
You might want to jazz things up for a more bright and chromatic effect, or tone down a complementary hue to let your base color stand out.
In other words, color properties give you a chance to work with different versions of the same color. Thanks to the use of tints (adding white), shades (adding black) and tones (adding gray) – you can easily create milder or more vivid versions of a color to find just the most spot-on color harmony for your design.
Tips When Using a Tetradic Scheme
Here’s a few practical tips to keep in mind when using a tetradic color scheme:
- Try to avoid mixing warm and cool tones unnecessarily. Sticking to colors with one kind of temperature is usually the safer approach, especially for app designs.
- When working with website pages, go for a neutral color in the background (like white, black, or gray) to tone down any bold contrasts.
- Choosing one color as your primary focus is advised. This will allow the other three colors to complement your primary hue, creating visual harmony and balance.
- Keep your design simple by avoiding extra details and using clear shapes and readable fonts.
Google is one excellent example of a well-done tetradic color scheme that uses red, blue, green, and yellow. These complementary color pairs are seen across its logo and interface, creating a vibrant and memorable design to show diversity, inclusivity, and innovation.
You can discover more about other types of color schemes (monochromatic, complementary) in our Color Wheel Chart series!
To sum up, our Chart is a comprehensive guide to tetradic color schemes using color wheels, color palettes, and 20 tetradic color combinations. We also provide blank charts to help you with your own design and artistic practice.
By applying these concepts, artists & designers can facilitate learning, inspire creativity in color selection, and create more harmonious compositions that effectively communicate their intended messages.
Our professionally designed Color Wheel Chart: The Monochrome Circle is downloadable in PDF and ADOBE formats. A blank version of the chart has also been provided to help you hone your own design or artistic skills.
Note that the combinations and schemes shown in these charts may vary significantly based on the medium used (e.g., watercolor, acrylic, digital) and the color model (e.g., CMYK, RGB, HSL).
In addition, display settings (such as night mode and resolution) can also affect color appearance. To avoid errors, always test colors in your specific context for more accurate results.
