About Ceramic Guide
Ceramic Guide is an independent reference site for ceramic craft, covering clay bodies, forming techniques, glaze families, kiln atmospheres, and the pyrometric cone chart. It exists because the basic numbers of the craft — firing temperatures, iron percentages in glazes, cone equivalents — are scattered across dozens of blogs, supplier pages, and academic articles, and they don't always agree.
Editorial principles
Every figure on this site links to a source. When you see a temperature, a cone number, an iron percentage, or a date, there is a citation marker (in dimmed text) next to it pointing to where that figure came from — Orton Ceramic, Digitalfire, Wikipedia, named studios, or peer publications. If a fact has multiple authoritative sources, we cite more than one.
We do not fabricate values. If a temperature or specification cannot be verified, it is marked Awaiting verification rather than filled in with a plausible-sounding guess.
Opinion is labelled as opinion. The "Where to Start" section and the tech-note callouts under the cone chart are explicitly framed as Site analysis — they are arguments built on the underlying data, not universal facts. Different studios teach differently and reasonable people disagree.
Terminology stays in its original form. Tenmoku stays Tenmoku in English; 青瓷 stays as 青瓷 in Chinese (with the English "celadon" alongside). We don't translate glaze names or firing techniques in ways that erase their origin.
Primary sources used
- The Edward Orton Jr. Ceramic Foundation — pyrometric cone equivalents and heat-work concept
- Digitalfire — glaze chemistry, materials database, troubleshooting
- Wikipedia — forming techniques, slip casting, coiling, pottery history
- Glazy — firing ranges, recipe database
- The Ceramic School — clay body fundamentals
- Ceramic Materials Workshop — glaze families, application guidance
Disclosure
Ceramic Guide is not affiliated with Orton Ceramic, Digitalfire, any clay-body manufacturer, any kiln manufacturer, or any of the studios cited. We do not receive payment for citations; sources are chosen because they are authoritative on the specific point being made.
Corrections
If you find an error or have a more authoritative source for a figure, the site improves — that is the point of citation. Corrections welcome at the contact address shown in the footer (to be added in a future revision).
About the build
This site is a static deployment on Cloudflare Pages. Engineering scaffolding (mobile-first sticky navigation, cache-busted assets, security headers, JSON-LD structured data, sitemap with hreflang) inherits patterns proven on the game-guide-factory infrastructure base. Content is original and fully sourced.