Triadic
Three hues spaced evenly around a color wheel, giving a lively palette that feels balanced when one color leads and two support it.
See it
What it is
A triadic scheme picks three hues at equal intervals around a color wheel, forming an equilateral triangle. On the RGB/HSL wheel the offsets are 120 degrees, so red, green, and blue form one triad. On the traditional RYB wheel, the best-known triad is red, yellow, and blue, the combination behind Superman's classic costume.
Reach for a triad when a two-color palette feels too narrow but you still want a rule holding the set together. It suits playful brands, editorial illustration, game interfaces, and charts with three major categories. Make one hue dominant and give the other two smaller, distinct jobs.
Gotcha: three equally loud hues produce noise, not balance. Change their area, lightness, and chroma instead of using all three at full strength. The chosen wheel matters too, and equal hue spacing says nothing about text contrast or color-vision accessibility, so verify those separately.
Ask AI for it
Build a triadic palette from the current primary color on the RGB/HSL wheel. Take its CSS hsl() hue H and derive H plus 120 and H plus 240 degrees, wrapping at 360. Assign the base, secondary, and accent colors in a 70/20/10 area ratio, then tune their OKLCH lightness and chroma so they do not compete at equal strength. Output CSS custom properties, hex fallbacks, a conic-gradient() wheel marker, and WCAG 2.2 contrast ratios for every text and background pairing.