Wada 258 — Burnt Lake
Sanzo Wada, A Dictionary of Color Combinations (1933) — combination 258
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A synthetic demo grid, classed with equal intervals — the point is the palette against real basemap ink, not the data. Switch themes to see how much basemap the palette leaves room for.
Metadata
Provenance
Combination 258 sets a dark burnt lake and a pale pinkish cinnamon against olive and Antwerp blue — the dictionary's spelling, "Antwarp", preserved from the digitization. Wada's six volumes catalogue hundreds of these groupings, each printed as a small block of overlapping color, and the numbering used here is the one the plates carry. The hex values come from a community digitization of the plates on GitHub; the repository's MIT license covers its code, not the transcribed color data, and the underlying 1930s publication's status varies by jurisdiction. Nobody in that chain has asserted a license over the values themselves. The owner reviewed and published this entry on 2026-08-17 with that question still open (mp-ye93), when it was seeded into the map-party core catalog as the picker's Wada-era qualitative option, replacing the retired dusk-harbor set (mp-61pe).
When to use it
A four-class set with an unusually good balance of light and dark, which makes it one of the few historical palettes that still works for small polygons. The cinnamon is light enough to sit under labels; the burnt lake and blue are dark enough to hold as lines. Keep it on a pale basemap and resist adding a fifth color — the balance is what makes it work.
License
Unresolved — the 1930s publication's status varies by jurisdiction and the 2024 digitization carries no explicit license; published by owner decision 2026-08-17 (mp-ye93) · source
The color specification carries this license, which is separate from the MIT license on this site. See attribution.