When you'd use this
Hanbok and traditional garment design, museum panels, sageuk (historical drama) production design, traditional architecture interior work, publication covers, and student design assignments. Global tools (Coolors, Adobe Color) don't carry Korean traditional color names, so designers usually hunt the hex values manually — this tool consolidates that work onto a single page.
Where the 87 hex values come from
From the 1992 publication "Korean Traditional Standard Color Names and Colors (2nd Draft)" by the National Museum of Modern Art. The Munsell values were converted to RGB / CMYK / hex by Chung-Ang University and the Moon Eun-bae Color Design Institute. This tool builds on a table compiled by the cyanindesign design blog (2022). For colors lacking a Munsell value (gold, white, black), digital palette values were substituted.
Obangsaek (the five cardinal colors)
The five cardinal colors of yin-yang and the five elements:
- 청 (blue) — East, Azure dragon (wood)
- 적 (red) — South, Vermilion bird (fire)
- 황 (yellow) — Center, Yellow dragon (earth)
- 백 (white) — West, White tiger (metal)
- 흑 (black) — North, Black tortoise (water)
The five secondary colors (간색 — green / pink / cyan / purple / sulfur yellow) are distributed across the yellow / blue / green / red / purple groups in this dataset.
Seven groups
The 87 colors are organized into seven groups — useful for browsing, though not a strict match for the official KS A 0011 classification.
- Obangsaek — five cardinal colors (청 · 적 · 황 · 백 · 흑)
- Yellow — including 송화 · 치자 · 유황 · 자황 · 토색 (~15 colors)
- Blue — including 군청 · 남색 · 감색 · 벽색 · 취람 (~14)
- Green — including 옥색 · 청록 · 연두 · 뇌록 · 하엽 (~18)
- Red — including 다홍 · 연지 · 분홍 · 주홍 · 석간주 (~20)
- Purple — including 자주 · 보라 · 홍람 · 포도 · 청자 (~11)
- Achromatic — including 회색 · 치색 · 설백 · 유백 · 소색 (~9)
Sending colors to other tools
Each card's hex can be copied and pasted into the other Inktab color tools.
- color-palette — Seed an 11-stop scale. Turn one indigo into sky-50 through sky-950 design tokens.
- contrast — Check legibility of body text or UI components when combining two traditional colors.
- color-convert — See six formats simultaneously (hex / rgb / hsl / oklch / lab / display-p3). CMYK for print is a separate tool (planned).
- color-blind — Verify how protan / deutan viewers perceive otherwise distinct hues from the blue and purple groups.
Are these the "true" Korean traditional colors?
Strictly, this is the 1992 National Museum of Modern Art reference standard. Real natural pigments (cinnabar, indigo, gardenia, ink) vary by extraction method, era, and region — they cannot be reduced to a single hex value. Treat this dataset as a design / education / restoration color reference standard, not a literal pigment record. Verified pigment restoration requires expert color-science input.
When this isn't the right tool
- Print-accurate CMYK — this tool focuses on screen-friendly hex. For ICC-profiled CMYK, see the planned RGB↔CMYK tool.
- Automatic harmony recommendations — this is a search / reference tool. Combine with color-palette or color-convert for derived scales.
- Pantone matching — Pantone licensed data is not supported.
Public color data, no external calls
The Korean Traditional Standard Colors (1992, National Museum of Modern Art) ship as static JSON in the bundle. Search, filter, and convert run in the page — no database or API call.