Design your gallery wall.
Curate here. Hang it later.

How to design a gallery wall

A gallery wall is a curated arrangement of framed prints, photographs, posters or art objects hung together as a single composition. Where one statement piece commands a wall on its own, a gallery wall layers multiple smaller frames — usually three to nine — into a larger shape that fills the room and tells a richer visual story. The arrangement, the spacing, the frame finishes and the rhythm of sizes are what turn a stack of pictures into a designed wall.

The biggest mistake people make is buying frames first and figuring out the layout on the wall with painter's tape. Designing the gallery wall at real scale — print sizes in centimetres, frame thicknesses chosen, mat widths adjusted — gives you a plan you can actually buy from. You see exactly which prints fit your space, how much frame chrome the composition can carry, and whether a 40 × 60 print is going to overpower the couch beneath it.

Three rules cover most gallery walls

• Pick one anchor piece — your largest frame — and let the smaller frames orbit it.
• Keep the frame palette narrow: two finishes maximum, for example matte black plus a warm wood.
• Treat the gap between frames as part of the design — 5–8 cm reads as one composition, 15+ cm reads as separate pieces.

The opendigitalgallery designer covers all three. Drop your prints into the library, set the wall size to match your real one, drag frames into place against the cm-accurate scale bar, and tune each frame's color, thickness and mat. The full design encodes into a single shareable URL — no signup, no upload to a server. Plan it in your browser, share the link with your partner or your printer, and only buy the frames once the layout looks right.