Themes and Relationships

To choose attractive colour themes for your Web pages, you must have some notion of colour relationships. A number of specialised books describe the feelings suggested by colours. For example, it is said that violet stands for passion, red for anger, blue for tranquility, etc. Let us not add to these subjective views, but rather tackle the aesthetic aspects and harmonious relationships between the different colours.

The colour wheel, which generally includes 12 colours, distinguishes three types of colours: primary, secondary and tertiary:



Primary, secondary and tertiary colours

This wheel and these colour definitions will enable us to introduce a few terms relating to colour relationships:

• The complementary colours lie opposite each other on the colour wheel.
  
  




• The intermediate complementary colours are those that lie next to a main complementary colour on the colour wheel.
  
  




• The neighbouring colours are those that lie side by side on the colour wheel.