Indigo is a watercolor material system for colour-batch work. Pigment doesn't sit in flat layers — it advances as a bleed front and settles into granulation wells you can read at a glance, all on deep wet paper.
Every surface in Indigo carries a feathered pigment frontier rising from one edge — a hard wet line softening into the paper. State is the front advancing across a control, so a hover, a selection, or a live value reads as wet pigment moving, not a box that changed colour.
A masked radial frontier laid behind content. The hard edge reads as the brush line; the feathered tail is the bleed into damp paper.
Primary actions seed a single madder drop. One charge per surface — emphasis stays a deliberate event, not scattered splatter.
Fine ink linework and metadata stay crisp on the dark ground. Pigment never crosses into the text it must not obscure.
Each metric is a well where heavier pigment means a higher reading. The grain settles toward the base, so a glance across the row tells you the batch's health before you read a single number.
The review plate keeps a disciplined grid under the pigment: ink contour rules stay sharp, the wet front carries the read, and one gold splatter marks the batch that needs a second look.
The front tells us the dye is moving. We catch a bad vat by how the pigment travels, not by waiting for it to dry.Esi Owusu — Colour lead, Vatworks
Indigo ships as inline tokens, a shadcn theme, and a full embodiment — bleed fronts, granulation wells, and the wet ground intact.