I really like the designs that fractals create, but one of the problems of running a small gallery is the choice of the wall color and whether or not the fractal should have a border. Take for example Cosine's gallery http://www.zanografix.com/ipw-web/gallery my initial reaction was to make the wall color black, but that washes out those pictures where the backround doesn't terminate in a border. Now I don't want to change anything that Cosine did posting. Even 1 one pixel wide white border changes everything. Any suggestions?

The simplest way to resolve this problem would be to ask the artist about his/her preferences. Most of us know what we like.

I just started putting borders on my fractals a short while ago, but now I'm a firm believer in it. My reason is that I do my borders in colors from the fractal, so I think the frame complements the fractal. But tjames makes a very good point; without a border, it can be hard to see where the fractal ends and the background begins. With my gallery at zanografix, the problem is twofold. Two of the images are old, from before I started adding borders, and when I uploaded to the gallery I couldn't find the bitmaps for those two from which to add the borders. So if I want to add borders I'll have to re-render, which I may very well do. The other problem is that one of them, the emerald one for anyone who has looked, already has a frame, but it's essentially the same color as the fractal, so it hardly counts. I consider that fram an experiment that didn't really work. So even if I re-render the others, that one will keep its apparent lack of a frame. I guess all I'm saying is that I agree, it's a hard problem. Some people never frame their images, so what should the gallery owner do then? I know the gallery software that tjames is using is very user-friendly, but I don't know if it allows different galleries to have different background colors.

I know when Renderosity changed it's colors, the fractal people all were outraged that the black background disappeared. I do think that most fractals look best against a black background, but obviously there will be some few that use a slightly different black background themselves and will not look really good. At that point, I think the artist should arrange to do what he/she thinks is best for their own image, or even not post that particular one.

I tend to not frame. Why, because a frame doesn't work well with a desktop. I started making fractals because I collect wallpaper (desktop rotated every hour with new image using Wallmaster Pro), so I wanted to give back. The start bar usually gets in the way and overlaps part of the frame and makes it look strange. What I've noticed here is that most of the people that frame don't submit in the traditional desktop size.