---
name: Color wheel
slug: color-wheel
category: color
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A circular arrangement of hues that makes relationships between
  colours geometric, so a scheme becomes a shape drawn across the circle.
aliases:
  - name: color circle
  - name: hue wheel
    source: community
  - name: color ring
    source: community
tags:
  - design-tools
  - perception
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - color-harmony
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - hue
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: "Design Glossary: Basic Color Terminology"
    url: https://design4users.com/basic-color-terminology/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: picking colours by their angular relationship to each other
---

The wheel exists because [hue](/hue) has no ends. Red runs to orange to yellow to green
to blue to violet and then back to red, so the sensible way to lay the names out is a
circle, and once they are on a circle the relationships become angles. Opposite is 180
degrees. A triad is three points 120 degrees apart. Analogous colours are neighbours
within about 30 degrees. This is the entire value of the device: a colour scheme stops
being a matter of taste you have to argue about and becomes a shape you can draw, move
as one piece, and hand to someone else.

There is more than one wheel, and they disagree. The red, yellow, blue wheel taught in
art rooms comes from mixing pigment, where yellow and blue make green. The red, green,
blue wheel comes from mixing light, where the complement of red is cyan rather than
green. And a wheel drawn from `hsl` hue angles is different again from one drawn from
`oklch` hue angles, because the two derive their circles from different geometry. So
"the complement of red" has at least three defensible answers, and a scheme copied off
one wheel and rebuilt on another will not land in the same places. Say which wheel you
are on.

A wheel is also only about hue, which is why schemes picked from one so often look
wrong when they are built. Twelve evenly spaced angles will hand you four greens and
one orange, because equal angular steps are not equal perceptual steps. Two
opposite hues at full [saturation](/saturation) will vibrate against each other rather
than harmonize. The wheel picks the family; the work of making it usable is done
afterward in [lightness](/lightness) and chroma, which is where a
[colour ramp](/color-ramp) comes in. Treat the geometry as a starting hypothesis, not a
result.