You're Wrong about Color Harmony

What if I told you that all the standard stuff you learn about color harmony is useless? Well, that’s what I told a bunch of college kids studying graphic design. In the spring of 2024, Professor Bernie Dickson of Chapman University invited me to lecture on Color Harmony in her second-year design course. She was kind enough to record the session and release it to me. And now I’ve edited down the 45-minute lecture to just the best bits. In this video, you’ll learn about the limitations inherent in trying to plan harmonies the traditional way. Red yellow blue color wheels, with geometric intervals of hue — that’s the traditional basis for choosing color pairs, triads and tetrads. But this method doesn’t actually do the work. What work do color combinations need to do? They need to reliably communicate, tell a story about a mood or feeling, and above all, be accessible and legible to people with all kinds of vision differences. In the final minutes of the video, I explain why character-first, rather than hue-first models of color harmony, make sense. If you’d like to know more, I encourage you to look up the research of Ellen Divers, or find a copy of Shigenobu Kobayashi’s Book of Colors.