What Does A 'Mount' Mean?

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If you take a look pieces of framed artwork, you'll notice that many of them have something that looks like a kind of card 'border' around the artwork itself, inside the frame. This is a mount!

A mount is a great way to provide a level of 'breathing space' in between your artwork and the frame itself. This is especially useful in situations where your artwork is very close to the edge of the medium it is printed on. 

How to work out what size of mount you will need

Let's say you have a print which is exactly A4 (210 x 297mm to be precise) in size. You can either A) just put this in an A4 frame with no mount, or B) create a mount for the A4 artwork to sit inside. If you would like a mount around your A4 artwork (option 'B'), this will mean that the frame that you will need will have to be larger than A4. This is because adding the mount around your A4 artwork will increase the size of the whole item. This then naturally raises the question: what size frame do I need then? The answer to this question is either A) a ready made frame size, larger than A4 or B) a custom size frame, which provides much more flexibility in terms of the size of the mount borders around your picture.

If you like the look of our ready made frames (the Nielsen brand is extremely popular) we've created a page specifically for fitting mounts into ready made frames. The only downside with this method is the lack of flexibility with the border sizes around your artwork; if you have a fixed picture size (A4) and a fixed ready made frame size (e.g. A3 / 420 x 297 mm) you cannot make any adjustments to the size of the borders (assuming you want them to be even) around your artwork, without changing either the artwork size OR the ready made frame size.

The advantage of custom frames is that you can adjust the mount border sizes and frame size however you like. 

A spectrum of style

Our range of custom size, computerised-cut picture mounts are available in a large selection of colours (a few of which are shown below). Create your own now by visiting our custom mounts page. If you'd like a frame and and custom mount, visit our custom frames page. If you'd like to upload your photograph to print, frame and mount simulataneously, you'll need this page. 

One mount, many moments

The chances are that at some point you've seen multi photo or multi aperture frame (aperture simply means the 'opening' inside the mount through which the pictures are displayed). The way professional framers do this is by using a mount, but with more than one aperture inside, in order to easily and elegantly display a multi photographic display.   

Multi aperture mounts are a fantastic way of displaying family photos, travel photos and photo collections that generally share the same theme. The beauty of custom made mounts is that your imagination is the limit. 

We'd like to think that you now have a much better idea of what a mount is! If you'd like to ask any more questions about the many layouts and designs possible with custom mounts please get in touch with us.