About

An unofficial reference to Sanzo Wada’s “A Dictionary of Color Combinations” (Seigensha, 2010; the original is 配色総鑑, 1933–34): all 348 combinations and 159 colors, a full-screen viewer, a catalog, and tools for designers.

The book

Wada’s original six volumes collected two-, three- and four-color schemes as a working tool for printers, designers and textile makers. The Seigensha Art Publishing reissue (Kyoto, 2010) selected 348 combinations — that selection has become the dictionary’s modern canon. More about Wada himself.

Data

The foundation is the open dataset mattdesl/dictionary-of-colour-combinations (MIT license), which in turn builds on the compilation dblodorn/sanzo-wada. The dataset stores 159 colors with their CMYK print specifications and combination references; the palettes themselves are recovered by inverting the “color → combinations” relation. The file is committed to the repository — the build is reproducible and never touches the network.

Computation methodology

• sRGB / HEX — from the dataset (digitized print swatches of the reissue).
• OKLCH — converted with the culori library; used for perceptual sorting and grouping by hue and lightness.
• Hue buckets — by OKLCH hue; a color with chroma < 0.03 counts as neutral.
• ΔE2000 — perceptual difference of pairs within a palette (culori.differenceCiede2000): a “scheme contrast” metric.
• WCAG 2.1 — contrast ratio for every pair in a palette and for every color against white and black; text over the stripes automatically takes white or black by the higher contrast (guaranteed ≥ 4.5:1 — validated at build time).
• Stripe proportions — weights 62/38, 52/30/18 and 42/27/18/13, deterministically rotated by palette number: the composition of a book page, not a generator’s equal slices.

API & downloads

• /api/palettes.json — every palette with its metrics;
• /api/colors.json — every color with all coordinates;
• /api/palette/{id}.json — one palette with expanded colors, e.g. no. 117;
• /palettes.csv — the full export (RFC 4180, UTF-8).

The endpoints are static and served with Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * — feel free to use them in your own projects.

Attribution & licenses

• Sanzo Wada (和田三造) — author of the original combinations (1933–34).
• Seigensha Art Publishing — the single-volume reissue (2010) and volume two (2020); the book is still in print — buy the paper edition, it is beautiful.
• mattdesl — dataset digitization, MIT.
• dblodorn — the original color compilation.

The site’s code is MIT. The project is non-commercial and not affiliated with the book or its publisher. Fonts: EB Garamond and Manrope (SIL OFL), self-hosted. No third-party trackers.