Analogous Color Schemes

This is one of my favorite schemes. It involves using related colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. This page is an example. The background graphic is mostly shades of blue moving over to blue-green and then to light green. All of these colors are cool. Analogous color schemes are usually very harmonious. You could do one in warm colors too. This color scheme, with cool colors, is restful and drops back to allow the page to speak on its own. A warmer scheme would call attention to itself. It is wise to blur and blur again in your image editor such as Paint Shop Pro 4 to make it drop back. Unfortunately, the blurring takes away the 3D effect, and flattens the image as well as blurring it. Patterns such as these would also be great for pages with mostly graphics, such as awards pages.

You may click on the tiles to go to a page that is fully tiled.

A dark analogous cool tile. Very harmonious.	A mostly blue tile made more dramatic by the use of black and white.	A very warm analogous tile. Needs to be blurred some.	Cooler red, with different values dark and medium. Dramatic.

Notice the distinct differences in the above four background tiles. The first one has colors adjacent to each other on the color wheel. It's harmonious and would drop back and give a cool, yet somewhat passionate, feel to the page. White text would serve better here than any other color.

The second tile is mostly shades of blue but made much more dramatic by the addition of black and white. It seems to have a happy feel to it. But it is very distinct and probably could be blurred more to drop back successfully. This image would be hard to work with, even though it is beautiful, tiled it would be hard to find a text color that would work with this one. Perhaps red would work.

Wow! This tile is hot as a chili pepper! Look at all those warm tones. It is an analogous color scheme with colors adjacent appearing together. Notice that in analogous schemes such as you see here there is a dominant color, with all the other colors used as companions. Definitely needs white text. You would have a confusing look if all the colors wanted to be out in front. It would be confusing, to say the least. Notice how this tile seems to come out at you when displayed against a cool background and next to cool colors. It almost casts a shadow over its companion, the deeper red tile.

This last tile is mostly red, with darker values of red to work with the unification of the tile. It seems to have quite a passionate feel to it. It would be suitable for a page of very dramatic and passionate poetry, for example.