Triadic Color Palette Generator

The triangle on the wheel

A triadic scheme takes three hues spaced evenly round the wheel, 120° apart, like the corners of an equilateral triangle. The primaries red, yellow and blue of the painter’s wheel are a triad, and so are its secondaries orange, green and violet. This generator turns your base hue by 120° and by 240°, keeping its saturation and lightness for all three.

Each colour in a triad is the same distance from both of the others, so none of them is the obvious opposite of another. The contrast is high but shared out, and less stark than a complementary pair.

When to use it

Triads are lively and balanced. That makes them a staple of children’s products, games, playful brands and charts that need three clearly different series. At full strength three equal hues can look like a toy box. The usual fix is to let one dominate, use the second for secondary elements and keep the third for small accents.

Above three swatches, each corner of the triangle gains a partner 15°, then 30°, either side. That gives you lighter-touch variants of each hue without breaking the triangle.

Everything here runs in your browser. The colour palette generator has all six harmonies on one page, and the mode buttons above switch this one too, so you can compare a triadic palette with the others from the same base colour.