When you’re designing your house or workspace, finding the right colours to go together can be a very difficult and costly task.
I’ve compiled some colours that I think go well together, as you can see below, but more importantly, I’ve tried to explain why I chose those colours and how you can avoid making mistakes.
So first let’s address what not to do
I personally think that if I was an Olympian and I came 2nd, that would be the worse thing. If I’m first that’s great, if I’m 3rd or forth, well done good effort, but 2nd place, quoting Jerry Seinfeld “ congratulations, you’ve almost made it”!
This is also in my opinion the worst thing you can do when it comes to having 2 similar colours that do not quite match. In door 17 the darker salmon doesn’t quite match the lighter one, but it’s not far enough to create contrast, and it’s the wrong hue (the dark one being colder, meaning less Yellow) however the step is a different family of colour to the light salmon making it an eye sore. You obviously don’t want to paint everything the same colour as if you blasted everything with a paint sprayer in order for the colours to match, but you need to create the right contrast.
You also have to be very aware of your surroundings, and paint or build your decor accordingly. In the example next to it with the 2 doors, it’s almost perfect but again not quite right because the blue in n27 clashes with n1725 from next door. instead if n27 used the same blue as next door, or a dark salmon matching the brick steps, that would have worked better. In the same way, if you have a massive magenta bougainvillaea outside your property and you paint the front door red, it won’t work.
What to look out for?
So something that it very important is to identify the families of colours. What does that mean?? Going back to basics for a minute with the primary colours Magenta (Pink) Cyan (Blue) Yellow, Black and White.
You can add either White, Black or both to any colour and it will go well together as shown below:
However, when mixing more than 30% of Black, White or Grey to your mix, it may alter the colours so much that it jumps to another family and no longer works. So a rule of thumb is: you can mix a medium grey all the way to 95% to any colour to make it a bit dull and without much saturation and it will work. But either Black or White on their own, not more than 30% as an average.
Also trends play a factor in this. Remember the 80’s?…
Some colour matching is timeless, and some works for now then it’s either used too much that everyone is bored of it, or a someone pushed the boat out, it worked for a while then everyone got wise and ditched it, like the mullet 😅
Ok what does actually work?
Now let me show you what I think looks good now and will soon be ditched, what is timeless, and what is about to be the next big thing. These are my own observations, I may be totally wrong, let me know what you think!
Here are some colours that go well together in my opinion:
Let’s fix the doors colour scheme…
These are subtle differences, that make a big difference.
