Put the same print in an oak frame, a black frame and a white frame and you get three different pictures. The frame is not packaging; it decides how loud the artwork is and how it sits against your wall. Three colours cover almost every case, and the ninth or tenth colour is for when you know exactly what you are doing.
Black — the one that sharpens
Black draws a hard edge around the image and pushes everything inward. Graphic prints, bold typography, high-contrast illustration and photography all get crisper in black. It also anchors a gallery wall: when several prints share a black frame, the mix of subjects stops looking accidental.
Where it struggles: pale, airy, watercolour-ish artwork. Black frames those like an obituary notice.
Oak — the one that warms
Light oak is the safest choice in a room with wooden floors, linen, rattan or anything the internet calls Scandinavian. It softens an image instead of sharpening it, and it flatters botanicals, vintage travel posters, muted palettes and anything with cream or sand in it.
Dark oak does the same job in a lower register — it suits deep, moody artwork and rooms with darker furniture, and gives a small print unexpected weight.
White — the one that disappears
On a white or very pale wall, a white frame all but vanishes and the artwork appears to float. That is exactly what you want for delicate, light-toned work, and in bright rooms where a dark frame would punch a hole in the wall.
On a dark or saturated wall it does the opposite: it becomes a bright rectangle and competes. Match white frames to pale walls, or do not use them.
The coloured ones
We also make frames in red, blue, green, yellow, orange, teal, lilac and grey. They are not decoration for its own sake — used well they are the most striking thing in a room, and used badly they are the only thing anyone notices.
The rule that works: take a colour that already exists inside the artwork, and preferably a secondary one rather than the dominant one. A teal frame around a print with a small teal detail pulls the whole image together. A teal frame around a print with no teal in it is just a teal frame.
Coloured frames also earn their place in kids' rooms, and on gallery walls where every print is otherwise a different subject — one repeated bold frame colour turns chaos into a set.
What you are actually getting
Wooden mouldings, handmade in Italy. Up to 50×70 cm, including A4 through A2, the profile is 1.5 cm wide and 1.5 cm deep. From A1 upwards it steps up to 2 cm, because a bigger frame needs the rigidity. Slim either way — these are not chunky gallery box frames.
Glazing depends on size and destination. In the EU and most of the world frames come with real glass as standard. The largest sizes — A1 and up — and every framed order shipped inside the USA come with lightweight shatter-resistant acrylic instead, simply because glass at that size does not reliably survive a courier. If you have small children and would rather not have glass at all, say so when you order and we will sort it.
The frame arrives assembled. We mount the print at the studio and fit the hanging kit before it ships, so it goes on the wall the day it arrives, in portrait or landscape.
Decide by looking, not by reading
Open any print and click through the frame colours. The preview redraws the actual moulding and mount to scale, so what you see is what gets made. If you want to compare a whole wall at once, the Wall Designer lets you change frame colours on several prints side by side.