Framing a certificate, degree or award

Graduation season fills the shop with rolled-up certificates in cardboard tubes, and nearly everyone arrives asking for the cheapest thing that will hold it. That is a fair instinct for a gym membership and the wrong one for something that took four years.

Start with the mount, not the frame

People choose a moulding first because it is the part you can see from across the room. In practice the mount does more work. A generous border gives the document room to be read, keeps the glass off the paper, and makes a modest certificate look deliberate rather than apologetic.

The convention is a wider margin at the bottom than the top. It looks wrong written down and correct on a wall, because the eye reads the piece as sitting slightly high in its opening.

Keep the glass off the paper

A certificate pressed flat against glass will eventually stick to it, and heat and damp speed that up. A mount holds the two apart. If the document is already valuable or already old, say so, and we will use materials that will not yellow against it.

Anything with a raised seal or a ribbon needs depth as well, which means a box frame rather than a flat one. Flattening a seal under glass cracks it.

Two or three together

Degrees, professional qualifications and memberships usually arrive over several years in slightly different sizes and colours. Framed separately as they come, they never quite match. Framed together, with a common mount and moulding, they read as one piece.

If more are coming, tell us. We can work to a format now so that the next one matches rather than nearly matches.

What it is worth spending on

The honest answer is that a certificate frame is not expensive work, and the difference between a passable job and a proper one is small. Where it does cost more is non-reflective glass, which is worth it in a hall or an office with a window opposite, and nowhere else.

Bring the certificate in rather than the measurements. Paper sizes for these are rarely standard, and a degree that is "about A4" is usually not.