Page Six of Watchmen #1, created by Alan Moore. Illustrations by Dave Gibbons  (DC Comics, Sept. 1986)

Framing is the condition in which a piece of work is presented to viewers in a design specific way. Everyday we see framing all around us, whether it be the design of a website or a advertisement picture in a magazine, and as a part of design practice it is an important tool to have. Though frames can be hard to identify when looking at a picture, you just have to look outside the context of the work to find how framing has influenced your interpretation of the content. Designers use margins and borders to separate the frame of the page from the content on it, while cropping can emphasis a specific area of a picture by cutting off all the unneeded parts of the image and creating new borders for the image. From the Watchmen page, you can see how the page is organized through margins and borders. The bottom half of the page contains four separate images that all have small, black borders around them, while the spaces between each image and the space below the page’s text are margins which help balance the design of the page and give concentration to each individual frame. Framing a framed image, with your hands holding the image or laying the image on a surface, is called reframing. By giving an image a frame that already contains a frame, the ability to add more context and detail to your content is available. Frames within frames can be seen in the Watchmen example above. Notice how the window in which the masked man climbs through gives a frame to the content, while the borders around the content provides a frame on the page itself. A last note to make on the framing of this page, is how the designer organized the text. While putting the text and images with each other on one page, the designer had to create a specific frame. Notice how the designer used the text as a border between the larger image and the four smaller images in the bottom half of the page. By putting the text between the top and bottom images, this implied framing gives balance to the page. Where the top image bleeds out of the frame, and is a heavy element within the design, the bottom four images give balance through numbers. Borders surround each smaller image, unlike the top image, which in turn through framing gives importance to the top image, while also emphasizing each smaller image through framing. Again the text here gives an implied frame to the page by providing space between the top and bottom images, while also giving context to the page/story through the organization of the text.