Hanging a print

We do not sell frames, which means we have no reason to talk you into a particular one. What follows is what actually decides whether a print looks right on a wall.

Height

Hang it lower than you think. The centre of the image should sit at roughly 57 to 60 inches from the floor — that is standard practice in galleries and museums, and it is derived from average standing eye level.

Almost every print hung by its owner is too high, usually because it was positioned relative to the top of a sofa or the middle of an empty wall rather than to a person. If you are hanging above furniture, aim for around 6 to 10 inches between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the frame, so the two read as one group rather than two unrelated things.

Size for the wall

A print should occupy somewhere between two thirds and three quarters of the width of the furniture it hangs over. Narrower than that and it looks stranded; wider and it starts to feel like it is falling off the edges.

For an empty wall, the common mistake is the opposite of the usual advice: people buy too small. An 8×10 alone on a large wall disappears. It works beside another one, in a stack, or in a tight corner — a stairwell, a narrow strip of wall beside a door, above a bedside table. If it is going on its own above a bed or a sideboard, a 16×20 is usually the honest minimum.

The sheet size on every product page is the whole piece of paper. A frame with a mount will add roughly 3 to 5 inches in each direction, which is often the difference between the size you thought you wanted and the size you actually needed.

Framing

Three things matter and the rest is taste.

Glazing. Standard glass is fine in most rooms. If the wall gets any direct sun, UV-filtering acrylic is worth the difference — it is also lighter and will not shatter. Anti-reflective glass is expensive and mostly solves a problem that a matte print has already half-solved.

A mount, or not. A mount board separates the paper from the glass, which stops the surface sticking to it over time in a humid room. It also gives the image somewhere to breathe. If you skip it, use spacers.

Do not trim the sheet. A framer may offer. The listed dimensions are the sheet, and cutting into it to fit a frame you already own is not reversible.

Standard off-the-shelf frames fit these sizes: 8×10, 11×14, 12×16 and 16×20 are all common ready-made sizes in the United States. None of them requires custom framing.

Light

Keep it off a wall that takes direct sun for part of the day. Pigment inks hold their colour far better than dye, but nothing beats hours of direct sunlight indefinitely, and the paper itself will warm before the ink does.

Beyond that, a print wants the same light the room wants — low, warm and from more than one direction. A single overhead fixture flattens a framed image the same way it flattens everything else under it.

When it arrives

Rolled, in a tube. Take it out, unroll it face up, and leave it flat under something clean and heavy overnight — a few large books work. It will relax completely. Handle it by the edges; the coated surface takes fingerprints, and they show under glass.