About Yanseku
Colors, organized and ready to use
Yanseku indexes every color a web page can contain: 16,777,216 of them, each with its own profile page. On top of that sit 32,258 colors people have actually named, 11,386 print and paint standard swatches, 3,290 official brand colors, and 161 traditional Chinese colors with their stories. Color is not an isolated value - the tools help you put it to work.
Why we built it
Looking up one color usually means jumping between a dozen sites: converters here, palette inspiration there, Pantone matching elsewhere - and traditional Chinese colors had no site where you could check the hex at all. Yanseku puts it in one place: type any hex and the profile gives you conversions, nearest named colors, standard matches, harmony schemes and real-UI previews.
Where the data comes from
Everything comes from open datasets, credited under their own licenses. Thanks to the people who made this possible.
- meodai/color-names
- The core of 32,258 named colors. MIT license.
- xkcd Color Survey
- A color-naming survey with over 3 million participants, merged into the library.
- Official color systems
- 17,765 standard swatches: Pantone PMS/TCX, RAL, NCS, full Munsell re-renotation, ISCC-NBS centroids, JIS conventional colors, CBCC, CSS and paint brands.
- simple-icons
- 3,290 official brand colors. CC0 license.
- Chinese & Japanese traditional colors
- 659 Chinese traditional colors (names, stories, categories) and 184 Japanese traditional colors with official print CMYK, merged from public datasets.
- ColorBrewer 2.0
- Cynthia Brewer's 35 map-color schemes (sequential / diverging / qualitative) — the cartography standard.
- MetBrewer / MoMAColors
- 56 palettes from famous works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and 35 palettes from MoMA.
- palettable / matplotlib
- 94 scientific colormaps: viridis, cmocean, carto, Crameri and other perceptually uniform ramps.
- flag-colors / LEGO catalog
- Flag palettes of 193 countries and 111 official LEGO brick colors with Pantone references.
How the colors are computed
None of the 16,777,216 color pages is stored - each is computed on demand: a hex comes in, the server works out RGB/HSL/LAB/OKLCH, nearest named colors, cross-system standard matches (CIEDE2000) and harmony schemes in real time, then caches them. Conversions follow the D65 white point; color difference uses CIEDE2000 - the same ruler the print industry uses.
The tools
Once you have found a color, a row of tools helps you use it: AI palettes, palette editor, shade generator, standard matching, image picker, color blindness simulation. All free, no sign-up.