Take the guesswork out of pairing colours

5 March 2020

“Always start the design process by thinking about the emotion you are trying to evoke,” shares Desi M., Cricut’s Design Team Manager. Design choices – whether it is the lines, the shapes, the colours and even the bases – are about what emotion you want to inspire. Are you looking for the mood to be relaxing or stimulating? Is the event a celebration or somber occasion? These are important things to consider before you ever begin in Design Space.

Once you understand what emotion you want to evoke, our Design Team often starts with a single colour that ties to that emotion and then builds complementary colours around it.

One way to create professional looking colour palettes is to take a few tones, tints, and shades of your primary colour (avoiding the pure hue), and then add in another pure hue (or close to pure) that’s at least three spaces away on the colour wheel.

Another way is to start with your primary colour and find its complementary colour (the one right across from it on the colour wheel). Then find the colours on either side of the complementary colour. Those two colours and your original colour make up a split complementary colour scheme.

Or the absolute, most simple way to pair colours, is to use the colour palettes below.