Journal
Essays and practical notes on color: the dictionaries behind the palettes, and how to put them to work on screen.
Ridgway's Color Standards and Color Nomenclature
In 1912 the Smithsonian's curator of birds published, at his own expense, a book of 1,115 named colors arranged by hue, tint, shade and greyness. Here is why he made it, how it was built, and where its names turn up today.
7 min read Read
A Dictionary of Color Combinations: The Original and Its Editions
A Dictionary of Color Combinations is a 2010 reissue of a much larger set of color books that Sanzo Wada published in Tokyo in the 1930s, and a second volume followed in 2020. Here...
Sanzo Wada 8 min read
Mark Rothko and the Weight of Color
Mark Rothko built a career on stacked rectangles of soft color, then spent it telling people not to look at them as color. Here is how his idea of color worked: as scale, light, la...
Color theory 8 min read
From Print to Screen
Every hex value for Sanzo Wada's colors starts as four ink percentages printed in a book, passed through a pair of color profiles. Here is how that conversion works, where it bends...
Sanzo Wada 9 min read
Who Was Sanzo Wada?
Sanzo Wada (1883–1967) was a Western-style painter who spent much of his life on color: founding a color standards body, compiling the combination books now reissued as A Dictionar...
Sanzo Wada 8 min read
Color at the Bauhaus
The Bauhaus never had one color theory. It had several, taught side by side: Itten's sphere and seven contrasts, Klee's moving color circle, Kandinsky's forces, Scheper's color pla...
Color theory 7 min read
Sanzo Wada's Colors in Your Code
A story about aesthetic, a forgotten Japanese artist, and turning 348 curated palettes into an MCP server that actually helps build better interfaces.
Sanzo Wada 8 min read
Werner's Nomenclature of Colours
In 1814 an Edinburgh flower painter published a book of 110 painted colors, each named and pinned to examples from animals, plants and minerals. Here is how it was built, how Darwi...
Werner 6 min read
Kandinsky's Logic of Color
Wassily Kandinsky treated color as a set of forces: yellow advances, blue retreats, green stands still, white and black are two kinds of silence. Here is his system, read closely.
Color theory 6 min read