Framing a Printable: Mount, Glass, and What to Skip
The frame is where most of the money goes and where most of the difference is made, usually not in the way people expect.
The frame is where most of the money goes and where most of the visible difference is made. Not in the way people expect, though: an expensive frame around a badly mounted print still looks wrong, and a plain frame with a generous mount usually looks expensive.
Three decisions do almost all the work.
The mount is the one that matters
A mount is the card border between the print and the frame. It does two things: it gives the image room to breathe, and it holds the glass off the surface of the paper, which matters because paper touching glass will eventually stick to it.
Go wider than feels natural. A 4 cm border looks careful. A 6 to 8 cm border looks like a gallery. Anything under 3 cm reads as a mistake, as if the frame was slightly too small.
White or off white for almost everything. A coloured mount pulls one colour out of the image and insists on it, which fights a piece that was colour graded as a whole. Black mounts work only with very dark images and only in very dark rooms.
Classical framing puts a little extra width at the bottom, about 10 percent more than the sides. It looks level to the eye even though it is not, because we read the centre of an image as slightly above its geometric centre.
Glass or acrylic
Standard glass is fine and cheap. Its problem is reflection, which is a real issue for the darker pieces: a dark image behaves like a mirror under a ceiling light.
Non reflective or museum glass costs more and solves it. If you are framing one piece for a wall you look at every day, it is the upgrade worth paying for. If you are framing four, put the good glass on the one that hangs opposite a window.
Acrylic is better for anything over about 60 by 90 cm. It is lighter, which matters for the fixing in the wall, and it does not shatter. It scratches more easily, so clean it with a soft cloth and no solvent.
The frame itself
Thin and plain beats thick and decorative for almost all of our designs, because the pieces already carry their own texture and colour. A 2 cm profile in black, natural oak or white will suit nearly everything in the printable collection.
Match the frame to the room rather than to the artwork. The artwork changes; the room does not. Oak in a room with wood furniture, black in a room with metal and dark accents, white in a pale minimal room.
What to skip
Skip the glossy paper, and then skip the glossy frame that people tend to buy to match it. Skip coloured mounts. Skip ornate mouldings unless the room genuinely has period detail, because an ornate frame around a modern print reads as a mismatch rather than as contrast.
Skip clip frames for anything you care about. They press the paper directly against the glass and there is no mount, which is the one thing worth paying for.
A budget that works
For a piece you will look at daily: a plain frame, a wide mount, non reflective glass. The mount and the glass are worth more than the moulding.
For a gallery wall of several pieces: identical plain frames, identical mounts, standard glass. Consistency is what makes a group look intentional, and nobody examines the glass on any individual piece in a group of six.
Every printable design we sell comes at a ratio that matches standard frame sizes, so you can buy the frame off the shelf and keep the budget for the mount.
See this piece
View it on our site: the printable collection.