Colour

Observations

• Two colours are called complementary if they form a harmonious pair. Most of these pairs would be acceptabled to most people as colours that don’t clash, although some of the more vibrant pairs are quite jarring.
• Three harmonious colours form a harmonious triad. Many of these are conventionally acceptable colour combinations for design work, particularly when the colours are not fully saturated.
• Four harmonious colours sometimes form pleasing combinations. This is usually when the combination could also have been produced by one of the conventional systems for producing colour schemes.
• Five or six harmonious colours are usually too many to be anything but confusing. They might have been useful if you wanted a tablecloth for a cheap café in a 1950s. You’ll probably want to wait until the computer flukes a combination in which most of the colours are related in some other way. Sometimes a combination of desturated tertiary colours may be acceptable.
• Seven , eight or nine harmonious colours can produce an ugly mess.
• The advantage of the formal definition is that it can by applied blindly by a computer program, as it is here, to generate many formally harmonious combinations. Nobody would suggest that artists and designers should blindly follow these rules.