Haishoku Sanzo Wada's color combinations

About

This site collects the color combinations of Sanzo Wada (和田三造, 1883–1967), a painter, costume designer and color researcher of Japan's Taishō and Shōwa eras.

The book

Wada published Haishoku Sōkan (配色総鑑) in six volumes in 1933–34. It brought together 348 combinations of two, three and four colors, drawn from 159 colors, as a practical reference for artists and designers. It was later reprinted in English as A Dictionary of Color Combinations.

Using the site

  • Tap any color value to copy it.
  • Each combination page has designer tools: contrast ratings, exports (CSS, Tailwind, Adobe, GIMP and more), mockups, a color-blindness preview, similar combinations and a printable layout.
  • Create your own combination from the 159 colors, and save or share it.
  • Press R for a random combination.
  • The site is light by default. The theme button at the top switches between Light, White (plain white, for judging colors), Dark and Auto (follows your device).
  • Tap the ribbon to bookmark a combination or color. Bookmarks stay on this device; export them from the Saved page.
  • Book shows the combinations page by page, two facing pages on wide screens. Swipe, or use ← and →. It remembers where you stopped, like a ribbon.
  • Gallery plays the combinations full screen, one at a time: made for a TV or a spare screen.
  • On a TV remote or keyboard, the arrow keys move between items and OK / Enter opens them. B bookmarks and F goes full screen.

Offline and install

Pages you visit are kept on this device, so they open without a connection. The Book, Gallery, Search and Create pages hold all 348 combinations, so they work offline once opened.

To install it as an app: on iPhone or iPad, tap Share then Add to Home Screen; on Android and desktop Chrome or Edge, use Install app (above, or in the browser menu).

Color accuracy

The book's colors are printed inks given as CMYK values. The screen colors here are converted from those values, so they are close to, but not the same as, the printed book. Your screen's settings also change how they look.

Credits

Color data from dictionary-of-colour-combinations by Matt DesLauriers (MIT license), based on the original dataset by Dain M. Blodorn Kim.