The color wheel is a circular representation of color hues, showing the relationships between primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. It was originally presented by Sir Isaac Newton in his book Opticks in 1704.^[1]

The color wheel is a valuable resource when creating color schemes and palettes. It serves as a visual tool for understanding how different hues relate to each other and can help designers create harmonious, balanced color schemes. Traditionally, it contains 12 hues — 3 primary colors, 3 secondary colors, and 6 tertiary colors.

There are two types of color wheels — subtractive and additive. Physical printing typically uses the subtractive color model, which is based on cyan, magenta, and yellow as primary colors. The model that is usually used online is the additive color wheel with red, green, and blue as primary colors.