If you’re a designer, you’re almost certainly interested in color. And if you’re interested in color, you could hardly do better than to pick up a copy of Shigenobu Kobayashi’s Color Image Scale. Fellow designer Kevin Hale has some more of the skinny on this fantastic design resource:

This little red book from Japan is written by Shigenobu Kobayashi, Japan’s leading color psychologist. Over fifteen years ago, he and his team at the Nippon Color & Design Research Institute matched 130 basic colors and over 1,000 color combinations to key image words to help designers express any mood, life-style or taste through color palettes alone.

Kobayashi’s work is particularly awesome because he categorizes three-color combinations along a “soft-to-hard/warm-to-cool” axis and assigns zones of color that match how we respond to the combinations.

This is only a tiny sample of the color combinations Kobayashi categorizes.

The biggest frustration for me has been the fact that the colors are assigned with a “hue/tone” assignment that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Example: One color is “GY/B”, which is a "green-yellow” hue and a “bright” tone. This is understandable, since Kobayashi wrote the book in 1990… long before a world of web design geeks. But I’ve never found a good resource for translating Kobayashi’s colors into RGB values.

So I made one.

The link below is a recreation of the color guide at the beginning of “Color Image Scale”. I scanned in the pages, color corrected as best I could and found the RGB values for each color. It is obviously not a hard-and-fast guide, but I think it’s a good starting place for figuring out how to directly apply the Color Image Scale to your applications or projects. There is a “small” version that comes in at about 1100 x 900 and a larger version that is 1900×1080.

Larger 1080p resolution version of Color Image Scale RGB values

Hope that helps anyone who has found Color Images Scale as useful as I have.