A color scheme is usually just some kind of geometry laid over the wheel. Pick total opposites on a straight line (red green) it's a compliment. Pick two nearby it's analog. Pick three equally spaces it's a triad. And so on. And, designers who talk about this get it wrong.
If you paint with pigments that let you accurately match the color of what you see then your values are handled for you automatically. But, if you want to use a color scheme you have to rely on a good monochrome rendering to keep things straight. That was my big mistake.
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I was used to just mixing the color for what I see, then painting it. So I was trying to do extra duty by mixing the color scheme, trying to work out the values, and trying to balance where it went, and it was too damn hard. A monochrome painting solved it easily.
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Which would also work for design, especially CSS, if designers knew about and focused on values first the way artists do. Color isn't important, and should be easily malleable. An idea CSS would let you assign values, then kind of randomly choose colors until you like it.
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The ideal workflow would then be: 1. Do the whole design in monochrome so that it is easily comprehended. 2. *Without changing any value assignments*, add the color scheme or try several to find a good one. 3. Then refine the colors and values to solve interactions between them.
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Or: 1. Do the fully rendered drawing. 2. Figure out the color scheme. 3. Paint it in the design while maintaining the values. Then it'd be way simpler than the current design method of "pick a color scheme then randomly place things on a grid and alter it until you like it."
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Finally, another way to put it is that CSS (and designer) color understanding is too complex because it's not broken down into the logical components that matter to human comprehension: value, hue, intensity so that you can manipulate them independently of each other.
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Without an ability to manipulate value, hue, intensity efficiently on their own CSS designs are as difficult as my earlier painting failures when I was trying to juggle all three in my head at once before I used values, then color.
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End of conversation
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