Outside of the picture framing sector, a passepartout is best known as the mount board. Multiple designs can be used for better aesthetics within the frame.
It is common to use a mount board for framing anything of value, be it of monetary or sentimental value. The purpose of the mount board is mainly for protection. What most people (other than artists and designers) either don’t know about or don’t fully understand is how numbers apply to art, design, and presentation.
The mount board cutout design is called a passepartout, and it can have the dimensions altered to create a better visual presentation of any framed piece of art or photos.
In essence, a passepartout is a frame within a frame. The mount board puts space between the print and the glazing, and by creating cuts with different dimensions, you can create unique designs.
Or, much easier is to use what has already been tried, tested, and proven to be equally effective at achieving aesthetically pleasing results.
The 3 Most Common Passepartout Designs
The Central Passepartout Design
A Central Passepartout design is the most common, mainly because stock photo mounts are generally cut with equal dimensions to pair with the frame size they will be used with.
With custom frame and mount options, there is leeway to create your own design layout to suit the art or photo that will be presented in the frame.
There is one particular advantage to the central passepartout design and that is that the frame can be displayed vertically or horizontally. When you alter the dimensions of the inner frame, it limits your display option to either vertical or horizontal display.
Optical Centre Positioning
This method is somewhat trickier to achieve and is by far a road less travelled in picture framing without the assistance of a designer. That said, it is reasonably simple to accomplish using percentages.
The purpose of using an optical centre passepartout design in picture framing is to prevent the illusion of your print sinking behind the mount board. This illusion often occurs when you place your print slap bang in the centre of the picture frame, as is the case with the above “central passepartout” design.
To achieve an optical centre position within a picture frame, the mount board dimensions are changed to have more weight on the bottom of the mount than there is at the top.
An easy-to-use method for finding the optical centre of a picture mount is to add 10% to whatever the top and side measurement is. The result is a 10% increase in the bottom mount board size.
As an example, if your mount is 40cm at the sides and top, the bottom would increase to 44cm. The optical centre is slightly elevated from the bottom, raising the aperture within the frame. It can give a better aesthetic from a viewing perspective as it prevents the framed print from appearing to sink behind the mount board.
The Golden Mean for a Passepartout
The Golden Mean (or Golden Ratio) has been used for centuries by artists and studied extensively by mathematicians and numerologists. For the purposes of picture framing, we will stay focused on the art, and the presentation of it using the Golden Ratio.
The Golden Ratio is 1:1.618. In layman’s terms for designing the passepartout, the Golden Mean can be accomplished by making your picture mount approximately 1.6 times the size of the print.
By altering the dimensions of your mount board, you can have an aperture window in any size you want.
Take a look at the prints and photographs you have on display around your home or office. If there is a mount board included, consider how it could be improved with a different passepartout design applied to it. At The Picture Gallery, we offer a made-to-measure service on all our picture mounts making it easy to create your own passepartout designs.