Complementary Color Schemes for Impactful Designs

Complementary schemes give you the strongest contrast available from two colors. That makes them the most effective and the easiest to overdo.

The basics

Complementary colors sit on opposite sides of the color wheel. Blue and orange, red and green, yellow and purple. Placed together, each makes the other look more intense than it does alone. Mixed together, they do the opposite: they neutralize each other and move toward gray rather than toward any hue.

What the pairing says

The pairing communicates as well as contrasts. FedEx uses purple and orange, a combination that reads as neither corporate nor casual, and that ambiguity is part of what makes the mark memorable.

Keeping the pair in proportion

The 60-30-10 rule is the practical constraint: 60% dominant color, 30% complementary, 10% accent. Two complements at equal weight will vibrate against each other rather than separate.

Neutrals do the rest of the work. Whites, grays and blacks give the eye somewhere to rest between two colors that are each demanding attention.

Tints and shades help too. They give you intermediate steps between the two complements, which smooths a transition that would otherwise be a hard, vibrating edge. Test the pair at the proportions you actually plan to use, since a complementary scheme at fifty-fifty behaves nothing like the same scheme at ninety-ten.

Where complementary palettes work

Posters and social graphics benefit most, since both have to register in the time it takes someone to walk past or scroll by.

Interiors use the same relationships at much lower intensity. One complementary accent against a neutral room changes the temperature of the space without redecorating it.

Common mistakes

Running both colors at full brightness is the usual one. Reducing saturation is not the same as reducing impact, and a muted complementary pair often reads as more considered than a maximal one.

Ignoring context is another. A complementary scheme suits work that needs to interrupt someone, and works against work that needs to reassure them.

Not checking across media catches people out. A blue that reads as sharp on a screen often comes out muted in print, and the pairing that depended on it goes flat with it.

Accessibility is the one most often skipped. Red and green in particular are the pairing that people with the most common forms of color vision deficiency cannot distinguish, so a design that relies on that contrast alone fails for a meaningful share of its audience.

Tools

Adobe Color and Coolors both generate complementary palettes and let you adjust the balance before committing. Behance is useful for seeing how other designers handled the proportion problem.

A complementary pair used once and in proportion can carry a design. Spread it across everything and the two colors start canceling each other out.