About

Sanzo Wada

Sanzo Wada (1883–1967) was a Japanese painter, costume designer and color researcher. He won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for the film Gate of Hell (1953).

The book

Wada first published his color combinations in six volumes as Haishoku Sōkan (1933–34). Seigensha reissued them in 2010 as A Dictionary of Color Combinations: 348 combinations of two, three and four colors, drawn from 159 colors.

Data & accuracy

The color data comes from the open dataset by Matt DesLauriers (MIT license), which builds on the work of Dain M. Blodorn Kim. The book specifies colors in CMYK; the screen colors here are conversions and will differ from the printed swatches.

Notes on this site

The six group names are descriptive names given by this site, not by Wada. Some color names in the source data contained typos; these have been corrected, and the original spelling is shown on the color’s page. Colors within a combination are shown in book order.

Independent project

This is an independent, non-commercial project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher Seigensha or the estate of Sanzo Wada. Many of the color names come from Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912).

Licenses

This site is built on open data, open-source software and open fonts:

Color data

• dictionary-of-colour-combinations – Matt DesLauriers · MIT
• sanzo-wada – Dain M. Blodorn Kim

Fonts

• EB Garamond – Georg Duffner, Octavio Pardo · SIL OFL 1.1
• Inter – Rasmus Andersson · SIL OFL 1.1
• IBM Plex Mono – IBM · SIL OFL 1.1

Software

• Astro – The Astro Technology Company · MIT
• culori – Dan Burzo · MIT
• Fuse.js – Kiro Risk · Apache 2.0
• apca-w3 – Andrew Somers (Myndex) · Limited W3 License

APCA contrast values are calculated with apca-w3, used under its Limited W3 License for predicting the contrast of text in web content.