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 that adds depth for the dedicated. The full daily archive, so any past day can be played back to launch. A rich color journal, searchable by hue and sortable by tier, exportable, with a year-in-color visualization at the turn of each year. Themed weeks and special palettes when they’re added — never displacing what was free at launch. The free tier stays complete on its own.
Coming after the first version of the app settles in. Anything free today stays free forever.
What you don’t get
- no accounts, no sign-in, no cloud
- no analytics, no third-party SDKs, no tracking
- no advertising, ever
- no photos saved or uploaded — the camera samples color in real time and discards every frame
- no streaks, no leaderboards, no time pressure
- one optional notification a day, off by default
Coming to Google Play
Free on Android. Haishoku+ is a future subscription for archive + journal depth, on top of a complete free tier.
Tell me when it’s out ↗