The Dictionary of
Color Combinations

The museum gift shop

Three ways to support the archive.

Everything in The Dictionary of Color Combinations is free to browse and copy — that will never change. But if the archive earns a place in your bookmarks bar, there are three quiet ways to help it stay that way.

From the archive

The Complete Wada Bundle All 348 historical combinations, five formats, one download.

  • All 348 historical combinations from Wada's 1933 dictionary
  • Figma design tokens (W3C-spec JSON, drag into any file)
  • Tailwind v4 config — drop straight into tailwind.config.js
  • CSS custom properties — every plate, one stylesheet
  • SVG plates — museum-style swatch sheets, print-ready at any size
  • Full JSON — colors, names, eras, moods, dominant hues
See what's inside

Launching soon. The free archive stays free, always.

Prints & posters

Museum-grade poster sets.

Each palette, printed as a single plate — generous margins, archival matte paper, designed to sit on a studio wall the way Wada's book sat on a studio shelf. Printed on demand, shipped worldwide.

Join the waitlist

Prints launch after the first batch of early supporters — subscribers hear first.

Library

The library behind the archive

Every palette in the archive stands on the shoulders of these five books. If you want to go deeper than hex values, start here.

  • Sanzo Wada

    A Dictionary of Color Combinations

    The 2010 Seigensha republication of the 1933 original.

    The source tradition this archive draws from. Out of print for decades; Seigensha brought it back.

    Bookshop.org or Amazon

  • Josef Albers

    Interaction of Color

    50th Anniversary Edition, Yale University Press.

    The most important book on how colors behave next to each other. Still the default reference in art schools.

    Bookshop.org or Amazon

  • Kassia St. Clair

    The Secret Lives of Color

    Penguin, 2017.

    Seventy-five individual colors, each with a short history. Reads like a cabinet of curiosities.

    Bookshop.org or Amazon

  • Victoria Finlay

    Color: A Natural History of the Palette

    Random House, 2004.

    Investigative travelogue through dye sources — indigo farms, lapis mines, safflower fields. The journey of kurenai.

    Bookshop.org or Amazon

  • Stella Paul

    Chromaphilia

    Phaidon, 2017.

    240 artworks organized by color. A visual counterpart to Wada's dictionary.

    Bookshop.org or Amazon

A note from the archive

The archive itself will always stay free — no paywall, no login, no watermarks on the exports. The bundle, the prints, and the affiliate links are how this stays sustainable without turning the site into an ad-supported SaaS landing page.

If you can't support financially, just share a palette you found useful. Word of mouth is the archive's oldest friend.

— The editors