Color shapes your mood. This new tool shows you how

It’s a common art class lesson: Contrasting colors on opposite ends of the color wheel go well with each other—blues and oranges, reds and greens, and so on. But a handy new website is here to shatter those preconceptions.



The Color Moods website, which is more of an online tool, lets visitors visualize an infinite number of color pairings based on the kind of mood they want to create. It is meant for designers and color nerds as much as it is for DIY decorators struggling to choose an accent color for the bedroom.



[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]



“There’s a lot of theory about colors alone,” says Ruxandra Duru, a color designer at Google and the creator of Color Moods. But when you combine them, she says, colors influence each other. Colors, as artist and educator Josef Albers famously theorized, are relative. “Yellow with pink or yellow with black is a very different experience,” says Duru, who used Albers’s original study as inspiration for Color Moods.



[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]



Duru began designing Color Moods with a question in mind: Is there a secret formula that could explain why some people find certain color combinations more appealing than others? After two years spent arranging little colored paper squares as a tangible investigation, the closest she has come to an answer is that the way you feel about a color combination depends on two things—the intensity of the colors, and the level of contrast between them.



Color Moods starts with a random color pairing that takes up most of your screen. From there, you can use a “stimulation bar” below that generates additional pairs based on the selected level of stimulation (zero for no stimulation, 100 for extra stimulation). The idea, according to Duru, is that the more intense and contrasting the colors, the more stimulating they are. The less contrasting they are, the more calming.



While playing around with the tool one day, I was presented with a combination of purple and ochre. I slid the stimulation bar down to a 16, and the page transformed into a desaturated palette of pastel hues. Sliding the bar up to a 91, I was greeted with a bright array of neons. The website lets you select color combinations and riff on them as if they are the base paints on a palette. With a base color chosen, the tool can generate pairings derived from that color, then copy the hex code and use it on a Photoshop project.



[Screenshot: courtesy of the author]



After a while, I stumbled upon my favorite color, royal blue, paired with a bright red. Too bright. I found myself yearning for something softer, so I locked the blue as my base color and kept clicking and sliding until my eyes landed on a murky, grayish lavender that I never would have paired with royal blue. And yet there I was contemplating this perfect pairing on an area rug.



Duru has had a similar experience with the tool. “I couldn’t say orange was in my top favorites, but orange and muddy green did something to me,” she says.



Much theorizing has been done on the psychology of color—blue is supposed to be calming, yellow is meant to bring joy, red is purported to stimulate the mind—but surprisingly little empirical evidence has been found to support it. That’s because our perception of color is shaped by the experiences we have, the associations we make, and the cultures we identify with.



“Color is very personal,” Duru says. ” I wanted to leave it to people to [experiment].”