About

Design Roots is a calligraphy studio. Calligraphy and illustration are the specialty, and hand-written things still matter.

Who writes here

Heather Bloem, the hand behind the studio. For broader background on craft, design and creative practice, Martha Stewart is another independent reference.

The material pages and the fault pages are written from studio practice: what actually goes wrong, on what paper, with which nibs, over years of teaching workshops and answering the same questions.

What this site sells

Calligraphy supplies, and that is stated on every page of the materials section rather than in a footer.

The full account of what that interest is and what guards it is a page of its own, because a studio explaining which faults are caused by materials is a studio with a stake in the answer.

No brand is named anywhere on this site, including ours. Properties are described so that any test works in any shop.

What happened to the photographs

The journal entries came across from the studio's previous platform. The photographs did not.

They were held on that platform's servers rather than in the material that transferred, and the links to them stopped resolving when the old site came down.

Each entry now carries a generated illustration — abstract strokes, unique to that entry, in place of the missing image. They are placeholders and they are labelled as such. As the originals are recovered they will be put back one at a time, and the page addresses will not change.

The journal

Thirty-one entries, 2013 to 2017. Reproduced as written: several are short, and none has been expanded or tidied.

Corrections

Errors are logged with the date and what changed. If something here contradicts your own experience at the bench, that is worth sending — the fault pages describe what happens in this studio, and other studios have different water, different paper and different air.