Gallery style photo collages

A wide margin is the single most reliable signal of care in printed design, and it works for a reason that has nothing to do with taste.

Space is the one thing cheap printing never gives you. A poster crams the page because paper costs money; a gallery print leaves half the sheet blank because the image is worth more than the paper. The eye has learnt this, and reads margin as value without anybody having to explain it.

It also gives each photo somewhere to end. Photos that touch are compared to each other; photos with air around them are looked at one at a time. That changes what a collage even is: a mosaic becomes a set of pictures.

The margin here is about six per cent of the shorter side, which is enough to read as deliberate and not so much that the photos become stamps.

Every other look in the bank puts a soft drop under each photo. This one does not, and it is the detail that separates a gallery print from a scrapbook page.

A shadow says the photo is an object lying on a surface. That is exactly right for a polaroid or a stack of prints, and exactly wrong here: a framed print is flush with its mount, and adding depth to it makes the whole thing read as a mock up of a wall rather than as the picture itself.

The hairline border does the separating instead. It is a single dark line, not a frame, and its job is only to say where the photo stops when the photo happens to be pale at the edge.

This look was built for printing, so the practical notes matter more here than elsewhere.

Leave the outer margin alone. Printers trim, and the whole effect depends on the surround being even. A collage cropped by three millimetres on one side stops looking careful, which is the only thing this look is trying to be.

Watch the paper. The background here is pure white, so on cream or off white stock the photos will sit on a faint rectangle. Either print full bleed or pick paper that matches.

The other side of restraint: nothing here hides anything.

There is no filter to unify mismatched photos, no pattern to distract from a soft one, no frame to make an awkward crop look intentional. Each picture is presented on its own with a line around it and space to be looked at, which is flattering to a good photo and merciless to a poor one.

So use fewer photos than you would elsewhere, and use your best. If your set is uneven, black and white will carry it and this will not.

Pick a collage above and it opens with the margins and the hairline already set. The look holds when you swap the photos.

For the exact pixel sizes to export at, see the print sizes page.