Office Wall Art Ideas: Define Your Brand with Art

How do you come up with office wall art ideas? While even a limited selection of art is certainly preferable to bare white walls, is it worth the expense to opt for quality or to go all-out? Will anyone really even notice?

Maria Simeone, VP of Marketing at Pulsepoint (a health personalization platform), certainly thinks so. “Our visual identity is like the clothes we wear. It’s the image we project about who we are and what we do. Your office is one of the most impactful ways to represent your brand each day, to motivate your team and engage visitors,” Simeone told us.

However you choose to implement office wall art, go at it with the intention of representing your company’s brand and values. Choose art that reflects the vision you have for not only your space, but your overall culture. Here are some thematic ideas to get you started.

Colorful art

To really liven up your space, why not implement a pop of bright color? Especially if the foundation of your space has an industrial feel, panels of color will help create a refreshing contrast. Take inspiration from SaaS fitness company Wodify, who sourced California muralist Ruben Rojas to convert one of their white walls into a fantastic mural with brightly colored stripes and block text spelling out “Empower”, which was meant to both energize and motivate employees. Watch the installation here.

If you don’t have the resources to commission an entire mural but still want vibrant, electric walls, that’s no problem either. Take a page from Paperless Post’s (the online stationary platform founded by siblings James and Alex Hirschfeld) book — they cover their conference room walls in vivid wallpaper that’s bound to shake up even the worst of mid-afternoon slumps.

Understated art

Though we just went over all the reasons to create a vibrant space, that might just not be your brand’s vibe — and that’s totally okay. Alternatively, you may want to decorate various sections of your office differently to evoke a certain feeling based on how a given zone in your office is used. For a calming, toned down atmosphere, choose prints and paint colors with muted tones. Homepolish designer Tina Apostolu chose to use this type of palette for sections of Paperless Post’s office, with elegant, understated hues like dusty pink, tan, grey, and white (and a few light pops of color here and there!)

Geographical art

Show a bit of regional pride with office wall art that symbolizes the city your company is in. This can be in the form of maps, street sign art, photos of famous landmarks— pretty much anything that represents your city. This creative mural at the Criteo office in NYC is a fun nod to New York City subway stations — they even went a step further by installing a wooden bench in front of the wall, similar to those found on train platforms.

Cultural art

Evoking culture with your office wall art is a great way to inspire your employees. This can mean a variety of things for your office, and doesn’t necessarily have to be related directly to your product — it just has to embody the cultural feel you’re trying to foster. For example, Simeone says they chose to design one of their office walls with a mural in the form of “a nod to cultural references that everyone from Gen Y to Millennials would get.” However, you could choose to hang up prints of famous art, film posters, canvasses with well-known quotes — the goal is to help get the creative juices flowing!

Educational

Promote the value of learning by having office wall art that’s educational in nature. The theme of Cockroach Labs’ wall art, for example, is “resilient species.” They’ve got a variety of species depicted on their walls, from sea turtles to Coelacanths to Gingko Bilobas. They chose this theme because, according to Office Experience Manager Cheri Dannels, “resilience speaks to both [their] product and company name”, but it certainly has the added benefit of being informative and indirectly encouraging intellectual curiosity.

A Cost-Effective Solution

If you want to impress clients, investors, and talent with your chic sensibilities but can’t imagine coughing up thousands on quality prints and paintings, you can always rent them. Try services like TurningArt to work with a curator and rent online.

Overall, when coming up with office wall art ideas, the goal is to create an atmosphere that reflects your brand identity and that makes your employees feel at home. Have fun making the space your own!