I’m taking a photography darkroom course in my spare time, and so am ending up with quite a few nice 8x10’s that I’d like to display. I’m a bit ignorant of the commercial art scene – what kind of matte/frame would typically be used for professional work?
Not that my stuff is professional by any means, but I do want it to look nice.
There is no hard and fast rule. With a print of this size, a border about 2-3 inches all around usually looks pretty good. There are, of course, standard sized frame and matte sets available at most photo stores. It is quite common to frame a print of a given size in a frame of the next larger standard print size: e.g. put an 8x10 print in an 11x14 frame, or an 11x14 in a 16x20.
The obvious advantage of the standard size frames is cost. They will be much less than a custom frame job.
Of course, the place you are going to display the prints may also determine the size of your frame. If space is limited, a floating frame is often effective. This sticks the print on a piece of wood, plastic, whatever, exactly the same size as the print, mounted on a smaller piece below. No border, and the picture seems to be floating off the wall.
As is often the case, it all comes down to taste and money available.
You’ll wan’t at least an 11x14 mat, preferably white, and optically center the print (it’s hard to explain. I’ll draw a little diagram in a minute when I dig up my notes.) If you just want it (permanently) stuck to a board for display purposes, dry mounting (tissue paper coated with heat-activated glue) is good, if you have access to a mounting press; use Seal or Bienfang* MT5 or Colormount tissue. Do not use the spray adhesive that comes in a can, it’s not archival and will eventually ruin your print.
If you’ll be framing it or if you really care about it, you’ll want an overmat (to keep the print from touching the glass), which you can have cut at your local frame shop for $5 or so. Mount the print to a backing board either with little triangular corners (can be bought or made out of paper; you’ll want to put a piece of tape over them either way, because the adhesive on the ones you buy doesn’t last all that long) or dry mount it. Then you take the overmat and the print on the backing board and tape them together at the top (on the inside, of course).
You can also tape the print to the back of the overmat (all the way across the top, and only on the top, to prevent wrinkling), but it’s harder to replace the overmat if something happens to it (hint: cut the tape, don’t try to peel it off).
For all the taping, I recommend archival linen tape (water-activated, like a postage stamp, $12 a roll) or Tyvek tape (self-stick, costs twice as much) available from Light Impressions. You can also get the corners and dry mount tissue there.
or: Gun’s too lazy to draw a picture and all the places I could copy and paste it from make it more complicated than the way I was taught.
The Cheap Way (requires a ruler and a pencil):
Place print in upper right (as you look at it) of mat board.
VERY LIGHTLY draw a pencil line halfway between the left edge of the print and the left edge of the board.
Draw a diagonal line from the top left edge of the board to the bottom right.
Mark the point where the two lines intersect, and erase the lines.
Place the top left corner of the print at the point determined in steps 1-4 and mount the print by the method of your choice.
The Easy Way:
Buy a tool from Light Impressions that does steps 2-4 for you. It’s basically a T-square with specially calibrated markings.
The Cop-out Way:
Center the print on the board, and move it up half an inch or so. 
That should be “1. Place print in upper right corner (as you look at it) of mat board.”
Another correction: “corner” instead of “edge” in step 3, of course.
I’ve got to start proofreading before I post. :smack:
So let’s pretend I didn’t forget all about this thread…
There’s an awful lot of nice stuff at Light Impressions, but with so many parts to buy the prices do add up. Any thoughts on their framing kits? They’re $30 for an 11x14 simple black frame, which seems to be only a bit more than it would cost to buy the parts piecemeal.
Also, how important is the optical centering? Most of the precut mats are just plain centered, so you can use them horizontally or vertically.