Triadic spaces three colors evenly around the painter's wheel, 120° apart. From red, that is red, yellow and blue, the painter's primaries; from orange, it is orange, green and violet. No color is opposite another, so the palette is lively without a head-on clash.
What it does
Press “Triad” under “Harmonies”. Its diagram is an equilateral triangle, the shape the three colors make on the wheel. The picture at the top of the harmonies chapter is a triad.
With a color locked, that color stays put and the other two take the remaining corners of the triangle, at the same saturation and lightness. The next card in the order Front, Back, Ground is turned 120° around the wheel (in the direction red, orange, yellow), and the card after it 240°.
- Front locked: the Back at 120°, the Ground at 240°.
- Back locked: the Ground at 120°, the Front at 240°.
- Ground locked: the Front at 120°, the Back at 240°.
Because the triangle is even, it does not matter much which color you lock; the three corners are the same three whichever you start from. That makes the triad the one harmony whose colors are true equals.
With nothing locked, the selected card gets a random hue and the other two take the other corners, with saturation and brightness drawn at random and the ground kept pale.
The three corners are even on the paint wheel, not on the screen's. A triad from red is red, yellow and blue; on the screen's hue scale those sit at 0°, 60° and 240°, nowhere near a third of the way around from each other. The wheel on the Color tab shows this. While “Color space” is set to RYB, the wheel is drawn as the painter's wheel and the three spokes sit evenly. Switch to HSV, RGB or CMYK and the wheel is drawn as the light wheel: the same three colors, lopsided.
Why it works this way
A notan has three colors and three roles, and the triad is the harmony that treats three colors alike. None is the complement of another, so nothing clashes head-on, and nothing is so close to its neighbor that it blurs. It is the palette of toy bricks and of Mondrian, and it is bright for the same reason: each color is as unlike the other two as the wheel allows.
That equality is also the triad's weakness. Three colors of equal weight at equal lightness have no hierarchy, and a notan needs one of its colors to lead. The unlocked triad solves part of this by keeping the ground pale. When you lock a color, you will usually want to darken one of the others, or drain some saturation from the ground, so the sheet and its flips read first.
The metaphor
“Triad” comes from music, where it means a chord of three notes. But the musical metaphor breaks in a telling place. The ordinary major and minor triads are not evenly spaced: a major triad stacks a major third and a minor third, unequal intervals. The one triad that divides the octave into three equal parts, the augmented triad, has an unsettled sound that seems to want to move on. Music's even triangle is its most restless chord; color's even triangle is taught as one of its most balanced.
The other metaphor in a triad is the idea of primaries: three colors from which all others are made, like three coordinates that locate any point in a room. That holds as a model of vision, since the eye has three kinds of color receptor, and it fails as a promise about paint. No three real paints mix every color; red, yellow and blue cannot make a clean magenta or cyan, which is why printers eventually abandoned them.
A history
In art
Red, yellow and blue became the painter's primaries in the eighteenth century, printed as the “primitive” colors of Moses Harris's color wheel in The Natural System of Colours. For painters the triad came to stand for color itself, reduced to essentials.
In the twentieth century that reduction became a program. Piet Mondrian, from around 1920, limited his paintings to red, yellow and blue with black, white and gray, and the De Stijl movement treated the primaries as the building blocks of a universal art. At the Bauhaus in 1923, Wassily Kandinsky circulated a questionnaire asking students to fill a triangle, a square and a circle with yellow, red and blue; the answer he hoped for, and largely got, was a yellow triangle, a red square and a blue circle. Later experiments have not found that people naturally make those pairings, which says as much about the school as about the colors.
In printing
The triad is where color printing began. In 1719 Jacob Christoph Le Blon was granted a patent in London for printing pictures from three mezzotint plates inked blue, yellow and red, laid one over another in register on white paper; his pamphlet Coloritto of 1725 explained the idea. Each plate carried one primary, and their overlaps made the rest.
Printers kept Le Blon's logic and changed his inks. Modern process printing uses cyan, magenta and yellow, with black added as the fourth plate (the K of CMYK) for depth and sharp type. Cyan, magenta and yellow are an even triad too, but on the light wheel: they are the colors halfway between the screen's red, green and blue. The printer's triangle moved from the paint wheel to the light wheel because transparent inks work as filters on white paper, and the most useful filters are the ones that each hold back one of the three lights the eye sees by: cyan holds back red, magenta green, and yellow blue.
In technology
The triad of light rests on a theory of the eye. Early in the nineteenth century Thomas Young proposed that the eye needs only three kinds of receptor to see every color, and Hermann von Helmholtz later developed the idea. In 1861 James Clerk Maxwell put it to the test: the photographer Thomas Sutton photographed a tartan ribbon three times, through red, green and blue filters, and the three images, projected through the same filters and superimposed, made the first color photograph. (The plates of the day were barely sensitive to red, and the red record may have been captured by accident; the principle held anyway.)
Every screen since works on Maxwell's triad. Its red, green and blue are an even triangle on the light wheel, at 0°, 120° and 240° of HSV hue. Studio Notan's “Triad” deliberately does not give you that triangle. It gives you the painter's.
In professional software
The triad is ‘Triad’ in Adobe’s programs and ‘Triadic’ in Procreate. Professionals seldom use its three colors in equal amounts: one leads, and the other two are accents.
- Adobe Color. ‘Triad’ spreads the five colors of a theme over three points a third of the way around its painter’s wheel, with variations in saturation and brightness filling the extra places.
- Adobe Illustrator. The ‘Color Guide’ has three variations on it: ‘Triad’, ‘Triad 2’ and ‘Triad 3’. Its four ‘High Contrast’ rules are triads at heart too.
- Procreate. ‘Triadic’ sets three reticles in an equilateral triangle. Move the main one and the triangle turns with it, as an armed triad does here.
What carries over. A triad is bright and even-handed, which is why it suits playful brands, children’s products and games, and why it needs a hierarchy. A common rule of thumb gives the lead color about 60 percent of the area, the second about 30 and the third about 10; in a notan the sheet and the ground usually take the large shares. In charts and signs a triad gives three categories hues that are hard to confuse, but only if their lightness differs too, because a reader with color blindness may see two of them as one. Adobe Color’s accessibility tools can simulate that before you commit.
Try this
- Lock the Front at a strong red and press “Triad”. The back and ground become yellow and blue.
- With “Color space” on RYB, look at the wheel: three spokes, evenly spaced. Switch to HSV and watch the same three spokes go lopsided.
- Press the wheel's rotate arrows to move the three colors through the three roles, and see which color works best as the sheet.
Going further
- RYB: mixing paint and RGB: light explain the two wheels; CMYK: printing ink explains the printer's triad.
- Split complementary is the triad's narrower sibling; Color harmonies explains all five.
- Books: Johannes Itten, The Art of Color; Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane.