What ceramic is
A clay body fired at a lower temperature than porcelain, with a glaze fused to its face. The body underneath is more porous than a porcelain body, and the glaze is what keeps water out.
That construction decides where ceramic belongs. A wall takes almost nothing: nothing is dragged across it and nothing heavy lands on it, so the glaze is never in danger and the body never carries weight. Ceramic has been the modern wall material for a hundred years on that basis.
Ceramic color comes from a recipe
White leads, then blue, then gray and green, and behind them a pink group with nothing much in the catalog to compare it with. Blue, green and pink arrive here in quantities the stone pages never reach.
A stone is whatever came out of the ground, and a printed porcelain is usually a photograph of stone, so it mostly inherits stone's palette. A glaze is a recipe, so ceramic reaches colors that no quarry supplies and no print of a quarry can invent.
Gloss, matte and the crackled group
Around three fifths of this range is glossy, which reverses the pattern the rest of this site follows. The surface it is going onto is what reversed it: on a floor a reflection records every scuff the floor takes.
Matte is the second group, satin and polished sit between the two, and a crackled group stands apart from all of them. On a saturated glaze the finish decides the color as much as the recipe does: a reflection gives a color depth, and a matte holds one even tone across the whole surface.
Crackle glaze, and how the lines get there
A crackled tile has a network of fine lines through its glaze, put there on purpose. The glaze is formulated to expand and contract more than the clay body it sits on, so as the tile cools the glaze is pulled into tension and crazes. It is a controlled fault, and the fault is the product.
It needs a thick glass layer over a body that moves differently from the glass, which is how the glazed ceramics here are built and is not how a stone or a through-printed porcelain face is built. It is one of the reasons a handmade looking wall is nearly always ceramic.
Ceramic runs small
6x6, 4x12, 3x6, 5x5 and 4x4 carry this range, then 2x10, and a group of half-inch pencil liners below that. Mosaic is around a fifth of the page on top of those, most of it in the same glazes as the field tile.
The distribution follows the surface. A wall tile is read from a couple of feet away, close enough that the size of the piece is a visible decision rather than a background fact, and the walls it goes on are full of edges a small tile follows without cutting. The large formats here are the exception.
Trim, shapes and the decorative pieces
Moldings carry real weight here, accent tiles and wall decos sit alongside them, and beyond the squares and rectangles there are picket, hexagon and arabesque shapes. Ceramic carries the shaped and decorative pieces of this catalog because a glaze goes onto whatever the press made: a pencil, a chair rail, a relief tile, a patterned insert.
Each of those pieces belongs to a particular series, so the piece that finishes a wall at its top edge usually has to come from the same line as the field. The trim range lists the profiles.
Zellige and the handmade end
The range also takes in a zellige look group, and zellige is the version of glazed clay that never got smoothed out. Glazed clay tile is thousands of years older than the craft, and zellige is where the unevenness stayed a feature instead of becoming a fault: the face moves, the color moves across a batch, and two tiles beside each other are visibly not the same tile.
The irregularity is the product, which makes it the one material in the catalog where a sample answers less than a full box does.
How thick a ceramic tile is
The common thickness here is 3/8 inch, with a group at 1/4 and below it that is wall tile in the strict sense, made thin because nothing is ever going to stand on it.
The 3/4 inch pieces at the other end belong to a different job, and the thickness figure is how the two get told apart on a listing.
Why there are so many series
Renzo, Urbano, Pearl, Essentials, Caramel, Sage, Pistachio, and a long tail after them. The list runs the way the color list runs, for the same reason: a glaze recipe can be changed in an afternoon and a quarry cannot.
It also means a series here is smaller than a series in porcelain. A porcelain line covers many sizes in one face; a ceramic line is frequently one shape in a run of colors, which is why matching within a series matters more here than anywhere else on this site.
Ceramic against porcelain
Both are fired clay, and the differences are the clay itself, the temperature and what that does to density. Porcelain is fired until it vitrifies and absorbs almost nothing, which carries it through floors, wet rooms and outdoor use. Ceramic stops short of that, which is all a wall requires.
The porcelain tile range is the other half. For ceramic in a bathroom specifically, ceramic bathroom tile is the narrower list, and green tile is where the glaze colors concentrate.
