About inq.lab
I’m M. By day I code for a living; in the evenings, I write code that makes things.
This is the place for the second one.
The handle “inq.lab” is a small wordplay between two words: ink labs, where I play with different colored inks; and inquilab, the Hindi/Urdu word for revolution. Both feel right. The work that lives here is small experiments — quiet, contained, repeatable — that together amount to a slow turning toward something I couldn’t make any other way.
Each tool on this site is a single web page that generates art when you visit it. The colors come from historical sources I trust: Sanzo Wada’s 1933 Dictionary of Color Combinations, Werner’s nineteenth-century nomenclature, traditional kalamkari natural dyes, Mughal and Greek decorative vocabularies. I’ve curated trios from each, by hand, one at a time. Code does the composing; the palettes do the speaking.
I grew up in India and I live in the UK now. The botanicals you’ll see drift between the two — lotus and marigold and tulsi alongside cosmos and oak and clover. I’ve been calling that wildflowers of two homes. It’s the simplest description I have for what it feels like to belong to two places gently and not entirely to either.
Every piece carries a small mark in its lower right corner: my handle, the year, the palette identifier, and a unique code for that specific composition. You can save any piece as a printable PNG. You can frame it, hang it, give it away. I don’t mind. The mark stays.
If something here speaks to you, that’s the whole point.
— M.