Part II...Friends don't let friends frame at chain stores

Back to the picture that fell apart

Here are some design tips.  The outer frame is black and rather harsh.  You'd probably pick it for a diploma, but not a great match for a baby picture.  It is also pretty small for a double matted picture with glass.  It was bound to fall apart.

Next, the matting.  Pretty boring.  There is no gold in the picture and the white does nothing to enhance the little girl.  There is a lot of unnecessary background.  It  could have been brought in to crop the shot.

Do we really want table legs sticking out her head?  Easy to photoshop and reprint.

So here is my redesign.  I scanned it and did some photo-editing to get rid of the clutter in the background, blurred the floor in the foreground and adjusted the contrast.  I grabbed a soft butter-cream mat, cropped it in close to the image and cut a groove in the mat. Three of the edges have the same mat size, with the lower edge being greater for visual interest. A 1/4 of silver shows which picks up the galvanized bucket in the picture.  A white frame was brought in.

You're professional framer takes the time to think through the design.  My charge was less then the frame store!

Friends don't let friends frame at chain stores!

A friend recently asked me for framing  help with one of her favorite snapshots of her daughter. She had taken it to a chain store and now it custom framing and now it was falling apart!

 

No joke!  Both side of the frame looked like that.  Do you think they could have used a bigger nail on the poor little frame? If you don't know this already, the chain stores really don't make frames on site.  Their computers link to a factory in another state that puts together your frame and sends it to the store.  Then your "certified framer" just pushes your picture in and puts a backing on.  They really don't care that the frame didn't get put together at the factory correctly and would have no idea how to fix it.  What they do know is that the customer just paid a boat load of money and is waiting for their picture so they just crammed this together and gave my buddy a call.

Your independent framer would have

1. never used such a big nail
2. inserted a small brad from the top, not the side, to make the insertion less noticeable
3. used glue and a staple to reinforce the corner.
4. charged less then the chain stores, even with their fake sales

A well made frame wouldn't break like this if it fell off a wall!

To top it off the design on this project left a lot to be desired.  The person putting together this project likely had some free time from working at the cash register and thought they would try their hand at design.   My next blog will take you through the design differences you will get with an independent frame store.  I'll show you what the chain store did on this and the design elements your framer would look for..