Color Names, Relationships and Harmony

Love this.  So freaking cool.  I didn’t make it.  Maybe some day when I grow up I can make cool stuff like Stephen Von Worley’s design team.  Until then, I’ll have to cut and paste from his blog.

I’m posting this because I’ve been beating the drum of color relationships rather hard lately.  I believe if you do not first fully understand masstone, root hue, parent hue, overtone (choose however you’d like to label it) you can’t reconcile deeper levels of color relationships and/or contrasts.  Understanding fundamental color relationships enables you to recognize and then skillfully harmonize the underlying.  In other words, your ability with color grows beyond a common color coordinating mindset.  Enhanced understanding grants you the choice to create simply with color —or— more complexly.

Simple color relationships and harmonies become a choice instead of banal default. As a creative, as a designer, whatever kind of designer you may be, that’s a really good feeling position to put yourself in.

The Color Strata states that this visualization shows the primary color names, their lesser-used brethren, and the relationship between them. Color relationships and harmony.

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