Edo era
Kerria Gold & Chestnut— 山吹と栗
The bright gold of the kerria flower against the warm brown of roasted chestnut.
Collection · 24 palettes
Retro Color Palettes
Wada's 1933 system is, by definition, the original retro palette.
Sanzo Wada published the Dictionary of Color Combinations in 1933 — the same decade as the Bauhaus, Art Deco's peak, and Japan's taisho-showa design renaissance. The palettes that feel most 'retro' to a contemporary eye are the ones with warm ochres, dusty reds, olive greens, and faded blues that appeared in printed matter, textiles, and packaging of that era. No generation invented these colors; they re-emerge every decade because they are simply beautiful, aged well, and carry the weight of history without needing to reference it. These combinations are the foundation of vintage-brand identities, record-sleeve art, and editorial nostalgia.
From the archive
Support the archive The full catalog, on your disk, as a thank-you.
- All 378 palettes (348 Wada + 30 editorial) in five formats
- Figma design tokens (W3C-spec JSON, drag into any file)
- Tailwind v4 + v3 configs — drop into any project
- CSS custom properties — every plate, one stylesheet
- 378 museum SVG plates — print-ready at any size
- Full JSON — colors, names, eras, moods, dominant hues
See what's inside
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Library
Colour books worth owning
The theory and reference behind palettes like this — recommended on Amazon.
Book links are Amazon Associates affiliate links. Your price is unchanged; a small commission supports the archive. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Studio
Off the screen
You have the retro color palettes in front of you. These are the materials a colour study like this actually gets made with.
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Pantone
Color Bridge Guide Set — coated & uncoated
This site hands you hex codes. Color Bridge is the deck that shows what an RGB or HTML value becomes as CMYK ink, and which Pantone spot sits nearest it — the translation step between a screen palette and a printed one. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both stocks.
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Pantone
Color Bridge Guide — coated
The coated half on its own — Pantone to CMYK, RGB and HTML in a single fan. The smaller entry point if your work only ever goes onto coated stock.
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Calibrite
ColorChecker Studio spectrophotometer
A spectrophotometer profiles the whole chain — display, printer, projector, scanner — so the colour you picked is the colour that comes out the other end. The full-fidelity option for work that ends up printed.
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Calibrite
Display Plus HL colorimeter kit
A colorimeter calibrates the monitor itself. Worth saying plainly: an uncalibrated screen is the most common reason a palette that looked right on your desk looks wrong everywhere else.
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Calibrite
ColorChecker Passport Photo 2
A pocket target for fixing white balance and exposure at the moment of capture — the step before any colour correction, if your palette starts from a photograph rather than a screen.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 24 — Art Nouveau
Gansai are traditional Japanese watercolour pans — dense, matte and easy to mix, the closest everyday medium to the flat printed colour Wada's plates were made in. This is the Art Nouveau-themed 'II' edition, a different 24 to the standard set.
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Kuretake
Gansai Tambi 36
The larger pan set. More range means mixing toward a specific plate rather than approximating it from six colours.
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Strathmore
300 Series watercolour pad, 140 lb cold press
140 lb cold press is the weight that takes a wet wash without buckling — the paper most colour studies end up on.
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Pentel
Fude Touch brush sign pen
A felt brush tip for the labelling and linework around a swatch study — the annotation half of a colour notebook.
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Pantone
Formula Guide — coated & uncoated
When a palette leaves the screen, this is the shared vocabulary between you and the press. Coated and uncoated because the same ink is not the same colour on both.
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Amazon Associates affiliate links — your price is unchanged and a small commission keeps the archive free. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.