Zakhraf Studio is an atelier in your browser for authentic Islamic geometry. Start from a documented historical panel, tune the symmetry and colour live, then take it out as a print-ready vector, a seamless repeat, or fabrication files your maker can cut from.
Free to explore · Creator from £12.99 / month
This is not an animation of a picture - it is the construction performing itself, rendered frame by frame from the engine's own geometry. No motion-graphics tool, no image model.
Every stroke you see drawn is a real segment of the engine's geometry, appearing in the order the construction produces it. When the linework is complete, the colour arrives the way a zellige cutter works - one congruence class at a time, one glaze per template, darkest first, until the gold strapwork closes the figure.
The same derivation runs live in the studio, under your hands, at any symmetry.
Nothing here is sampled from an image. Every pattern is assembled in order, from a documented tessellation to the strapwork laid over it to the colour. Watch a single eight-fold motif come together in three moves.
The polygons-in-contact skeleton. Every vertex is an exact line intersection, not a placed point.
The straps are woven into continuous ribbon. Over and under is decided by the geometry, not by hand.
Faces are grouped by congruence and coloured by class, the way a cutter works from one template per shape.
Every session can begin from a monument that is still standing. Each panel below opens directly in the studio, already set to that construction and palette; inherit centuries of proven proportion, then evolve the pattern from there. Adapted panels are labelled as adapted, never passed off as the original.
Cut-tile mosaic assembled from templates, coloured by congruence class.
Open this panel in the studio →Mature Marinid strapwork in the Fès tetrachord: cobalt, plaster, saffron, copper-green.
Open this panel in the studio →Among the earliest surviving geometric screens; each grille a different star lattice.
Open this panel in the studio →Haft-rangi, the Safavid seven-colour tilework, colour fired into the tile itself.
Open this panel in the studio →Carved sandstone screens filtering light through the hexagram, the Seal of Solomon.
Open this panel in the studio →Recolour a single face by hand with the zellige picker, or pull the whole palette toward a target across the surface. Everything carries through to every export, so the sample you show a client is the file the maker receives.
Judge a pattern at true size, in the room, before anything is cut. The preview composites your current pattern and palette into a set of authored room scenes, perspective-correct, with the room's own light recovered over the tiles - and at real tile scale: you choose the repeat width in millimetres, and the scenes are calibrated so a 300 mm repeat on screen is a 300 mm repeat on the wall. The rooms are indicative studio scenes (Reposition drops the same pattern onto a photograph of your own wall), and the geometry you are looking at is the geometry that leaves: the same repeat exports as print vectors and a workshop cut schedule at the same dimensions.
This is where the exact geometry earns its keep. Before a single file leaves the studio, Zakhraf measures the pattern in millimetres against your tool and counts every piece. Two downstream paths ship from the same click: line-work for a CAD shop, and a dimensioned template sheet for a workshop that cuts by hand. The screen and the cut file share one geometry, so what you see is what ships.
Every export is measured against your machine before it saves.
A maalem does not need a CAD seat. The cut schedule counts every piece by template class, and the tile module prints at true size in millimetres, the sheet a hand-cutter works from. The concept sheet carries palette and provenance to the client.
The studio's canon: six constructions that carry most of the tradition between them, each rendered in one of the documented material palettes - brass, lapis, marble, parchment, jade and the Fès tetrachord. Every plate is exact engine output. Open any of them and the construction is live under your hands.
No. Nothing here is sampled or generated from images. Every pattern is constructed live by a geometry engine from documented historical tessellations - the same compass-and-straightedge logic the original craftsmen used - so every line has a stated construction behind it. Derived, not generated.
Yes. Every construction is built on a repeating lattice, so exports include a seamless repeat tile alongside the full panel. The room preview is calibrated to physical scale: choose a 300 mm repeat and you see a 300 mm repeat on the wall.
The Free tier renders everything in the browser. Creator unlocks print-ready SVG, the seamless repeat tile, CSS, and fabrication files - a cut schedule at true dimensions that a workshop can make from.
Yes - patterns exported while you hold an active Creator subscription (£12.99 a month) may be used commercially. Free-tier exploration is for personal use.
No. Zakhraf Studio is software - a self-serve pattern studio that runs in your web browser at zakhraf.studio. It is not a design agency, a surface pattern design service, or an individual designer's portfolio, and it is not affiliated with other designers or businesses that use the word zakhraf (an ordinary Arabic word meaning ornament) in their names. If you are looking for the pattern software, zakhraf.studio is the address.
The heritage panels are traced to named, still-standing monuments - the Comares Hall in Granada, the Bou Inania madrasa in Fès, Ibn Tulun in Cairo, Sheikh Lotfollah in Isfahan, Fatehpur Sikri near Agra. Where a panel is adapted, it is labelled as adapted, never passed off as the original.
Zakhraf runs free forever for exploration and personal use. Creator unlocks the exports and fabrication documents needed to put a pattern onto a product, under a commercial licence.
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A documented wall, cut by hand from single templates.
The same construction, derived analytically and tuned live.
Fabrication files a maker reads without redrawing.