The Blues of Color Harmony
Using Adobe Color and Viz Palette to colorize your data visualizations
As noted previously in “Colorizing a Visualization,” Color Harmony is the process of choosing colors on a Color Wheel that work well together in the composition of an image. Similar to concepts in music, these harmonies are based around color cords on the Color Wheel that help to provide common guidelines for how color hues will work together. In the rich history of Color Theory, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell defined a concept called “Synchromism” based on the notion that color has similarities to music. Synchromism is meant to be defined as “with color” as Symphony means “with sound.” The artists also defined scales and color harmony in terms of this concept.
In this writeup, their terminology is used to discuss the “Blues of Color Harmony” where a monochromatic color harmony is built in the key of Blue. Adobe Color, a web-based app for creating color themes, is used to build the color harmony that is applied to a pie chart example. Next, the Blue monochromatic Color Harmony (Blue Mono) is transferred into the Viz Palette tool to view how other types of information…
