Din A vs Real Frame Ratio. Why Your Poster Deserves the Right Frame (and How to Avoid the Framing Fiasco)
- heysigasiga
- Apr 2
- 2 min read
Picture this: You’ve spent hours, maybe even days, perfecting your latest masterpiece. You post it online, someone falls in love with it, buys a print, and then — disaster strikes. They can't find a frame that fits! Now, your beautiful work is either trapped in a too-small frame with awkward gaps or has been butchered by some well-meaning customer armed with a pair of scissors and zero patience.
Sounds painful, right? Well, let's talk about how to avoid this tragedy by making sure your artwork plays nicely with standard frames.
The Great Frame Dilemma: DIN A vs. 5:7 & 3:4 Ratios
Most artists (yes, you!) create their work in DIN A dimensions. Why? Because print standards love it. But guess who doesn’t? Frame manufacturers. Mass-market interior shops—where most people buy their frames—stick to ratios like 3:4 (30x40 cm) and 5:7 (50x70 cm), sometimes even 2:3 as 60x90 cm. That means your A3 print isn’t going to fit perfectly in a frame someone picked up at their favorite home decor store.
Now, do you really want your customers sweating over custom framing costs? Or worse—doing some creative cropping at home? (RIP to all the signatures lost to scissor-happy customers.)
The Smart Move: Designing for Standard Frames
If you want your art to live its best life on someone’s wall, you have two options:
Design with frame-friendly sizes in mind. This means starting your work in a 3:4 or 5:7 ratio, so it fits into standard frames without any headaches.
Use mockups that show your work in standard frames. This way, even if you create in DIN A, your customers will at least see how it should be framed—and maybe they’ll think twice before trying to squish it into a mismatched one.
The Cropping Conundrum:
How to Adapt Your Poster Without Ruining It with a Frame
Worried about your composition? Don’t be! Here are some tricks:
Keep key details centered. That way, if you need to trim a bit off the edges to fit a frame, the important parts stay intact.
Plan for flexibility (our favorite). If you’re working in DIN A but might need a different ratio later, leave some breathing room around the edges. Just leave a small border of white or another color so that when you trim it to fit the desired frame, the art itself doesn't get cut off.
Test it in mockups. Before you commit, drop your artwork into a 5:7 mockup and see how it looks. Better to adjust digitally than after printing.
Essentials
Your art deserves a frame that fits — not a DIY disaster. So how to frame poster and dim't screwd up? Whether you adjust your canvas size from the start or just use frame-friendly mockups, making your artwork compatible with standard frames will save your customers stress (and save your art from tragic home-trimming accidents).
And hey, happy customers mean more sales. So, unless you want your work getting creatively resized by someone with a glue gun, it’s time to embrace those standard frame ratios!
Need frame-ready mockups? We’ve got you covered with stylish, easy-to-use mockups that make your art shine and keep your buyers frame-happy!
