A wall composition instrument. Give it the wall, the furniture underneath and the frames you own, and it gives you back the two numbers you actually need at the wall: how far from the corner, and how high the hook goes.
Almost every picture in almost every house is hung too high. Not slightly — commonly four to eight inches. It happens because people hang art at their own eye level while standing three feet away, and then spend the rest of the room's life sitting down. This card does the arithmetic that fixes it, including the one step everybody forgets: the wire.
The museum standard puts the centre of a work at about 57″ above the floor, which is roughly average standing eye level. It is a good default for halls and entries and a bad one for rooms where everybody is sitting — a living room or a dining room wants the centre nearer 54–56″. Rooms are looked at from chairs far more hours than they are looked at from doorways.
The moment there is a sofa or a sideboard underneath, the centre line stops being the governing measurement. What governs is the gap: 6–10″ between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the art. Under six and it looks like it is resting on the back of the sofa. Over about twelve and the two objects stop being related and become two separate things on one wall.
A piece or a group should span roughly 55–75 per cent of the furniture below it — two-thirds is the sweet spot. Narrower than about half and it reads as a postage stamp on an envelope. Wider than the furniture and it stops looking deliberate and starts looking like it was hung before the sofa arrived.
Every rule above applies to the outer boundary of the whole arrangement, not to any individual frame. Draw the smallest rectangle that contains everything; that rectangle is the artwork. This is the single idea that turns a gallery wall from an accident into a composition, and it is why this card computes the group box first and the frames second.
Gaps inside a grid should be tight and identical — 2–3″ reads as one object; 5″ reads as several. What ruins a grid is not the size of the gap but the inconsistency of it. If you can only get one thing right on a gallery wall, get the gaps equal, and accept mismatched frames.
Leave at least 8″ of bare wall above the top edge, more on a high ceiling. Art that runs close to the ceiling makes the room feel shorter, not taller — the eye reads the remaining strip as a mistake rather than as generosity. If the group will not fit inside the rules, the group is too tall, not the wall too short.
On a dark or delicate wall this step goes from advisable to mandatory. A patched and touched-up hole in matte deep colour is visible in raking light forever.
Under 10 lb — a hardened picture hook into drywall is fine. Two hooks spaced apart beat one in the middle, because the piece cannot rotate and you can level it by ear.
10–25 lb — a proper drywall anchor rated well above the weight, or find the stud. Toggle-style anchors carry far more than the plastic conical ones that come in the box with the frame.
Over 25 lb, or anything above a bed — into framing, or into masonry with the right plug. This card does the geometry; it does not do load. If you are unsure what the wall is made of or what it will hold, that is a question for someone who can look at it.
Two hooks, always, on anything wide. A single central hook on a 40″ frame means you will be straightening it for the rest of your life.
The instrument itself. Type in the wall, the furniture and the frames you own; it draws the elevation to scale, flags what is wrong in plain language, and gives you the marking-out table — X from the corner, top of frame, and the hook height with the wire drop already taken off.
Read the whole edition · $12.00
It is a web edition, not a download. It opens in a browser, it prints properly, and you can add it to a home screen and read it with no connection at all. Nothing expires.
An edition is tied to your account rather than to a link, so it is here every time you sign in — on a phone, on a laptop, in five years. That is also why checkout asks you to make an account.