From Project Flânerie · Back Room Strategies
Haishoku
A daily camera-based color game. Three colors a day, drawn from a hundred years of color theory. Find them in the world.
hai·sho·ku
Haishoku
配色 · hai-SHO-koo · noun, Japanese.
- Color combination; color arrangement.
- The first word of Sanzo Wada’s 1933 Haishoku Soukan, a six-volume study of how colors meet.
Wada (1883–1967) was a painter, costume designer (Oscar-winning, in 1955), and color theorist working in early-Showa-era Tokyo; he documented hundreds of color combinations he found in the world around him. A century later, a curated subset of his work is in the public domain, and the rest of color theory has caught up around it: Itten’s seven contrasts, Albers’ interaction, Le Corbusier’s architectural polychromy, Munsell’s ordering by hue, value, and chroma. Haishoku starts there.
Three colors a day.
Each morning a new triad arrives. Open the app, see the day’s three colors, and head out. No timer, no streak penalty for missing a day.
Find them with your camera.
Point the phone at the world. The reticle warms toward the target as the color you’re seeing approaches it; once you’re close enough for half a second, the match commits. No photos are saved or uploaded.
A small ritual that comes home.
Each match is a moment. Three matches close the day with a settled chord — softer or fuller depending on how you did. The progression repeats tomorrow, in new colors.
How it works
The day arrives.
Three colors fade in on a paper-and-ink home screen. A chord plays — D minor resolving into G major — and the day opens.
You go look.
Tap a color and walk. Sample what you see. The reticle warms, the ring fills, a soft pluck commits the match.
The day closes.
All three found, the day’s chord settles. Tomorrow, new colors. The same ritual.
color vision
On first launch, Haishoku asks how you see color — standard, protanopia, deuteranopia, or tritanopia. The daily palette is filtered to triads that remain distinguishable in your perceived color space, simulated through the same matrices a vision researcher would use. About one in twelve people see color differently than the average; the app doesn’t pretend they don’t.
haishoku+
A modest subscription, for the dedicated. Removes the banner ads. Opens an archive of this month’s past colors — and lets you play the days you missed, or replay one to sharpen your match. Adds a calm stats overview — days played, current and longest streak, tier distribution, average ΔE — shown as data points, not goals to chase. Your subscription is tied to your Google account through Project Flânerie, so it (and your match history) follows you across any device you sign in on. The free tier stays complete on its own; anything free today stays free.
$3.99 a month, or $34.99 a year.
How it stays quiet
- camera frames never leave your device — the camera samples color in real time and discards every frame
- no account required to play the daily game. Haishoku+ subscribers sign in with Google so their subscription and match history follow them across devices via Project Flânerie
- free tier carries non-personalized banner ads from Google AdMob; Haishoku+ removes them. no analytics SDK in the app beyond what AdMob and Play Billing require
- no leaderboards, no time pressure, no streak chasing. there is a quiet streak count inside the Haishoku+ stats screen, but the app never pushes it at you
- one optional notification a day, off by default
Now on Google Play and the App Store
Free on Android and iOS, with light ads. Haishoku+ removes them, lets you play past days from the archive, adds a quiet stats overview, and ties your subscription to your account so it follows you across devices — on top of a complete free tier.