Triadic color scheme

Various shades within a triad color scheme, and their mutual contrast.

A triad is a color scheme, a special variant of the split-complementary color scheme, with the equal distance between all colors. All three colors are distributed evenly around the color wheel, causing there is no clear dominance of one color. The scheme is always vibrant and colorful, designers should use it and balance very carefully to maintan the desired effects and color meaning.

Examples

Any set of shades of all three colors could be used with a triad, but the strongest effect and most vibrant palettes are produced with bold, saturated shades.

A typical triad – 3 strong colors evenly around the color wheel

Paletton usage

Within the Paletton application use the Triade (3-color) option (without a complementary color), to create split-contrast schemes. Set the distance from the base color complement by dragging one of those two supplement color, or by clicking the angle gadget and entering the value manually. The desired value to get a triad is 60°.