Having a space to leverage creativity can help with copywriting, designing, crafting, writing and even for work from home or remote workers. That’s why the inspiration wall has become a big design choice for many offices or studios. The wall itself has also transitioned a little with frames into the gallery wall, and become a design feature wall in rooms other than the creative studio.
Designers have long used moodboards in this respect, but these are more localised to one project. Writers have similarly used walls for putting up character and setting images or displaying plot and scene cards, but again, that’s localised to one work in progress.
Teens have been marking their territory – or bedroom walls – with photos, posters and album art and banners – for as long as they’ve had their own bedrooms. Crafters, on the other hand, started the whole inspiration board thing based on moodboards, corkboards, pinboards or dream or vision boards, and it was literally often on a board – a little corkboard or memo board. Great for cute DIY projects, and handy for some organisation, but I found one small board sitting on a wall with a few images a little sad (and hard to feel inspired by when I have difficulties reading small or distant things in my older age).
With an inspiration wall, you can have pictures and quotes that motivate you, display your own artwork or photos of the family, or simply use as a feature wall. Some inspiration walls even include organisation.
But the best inspiration collections have some design about them, they have purpose. The design may seem unstructured if taken out of context, but the messy and filled inspiration wall of an artist speaks to the type of artistry they create to.
Of course, everything has it’s darker side and this is found in the murder wall, a mythic wall of the serial killer or stalker who has managed to put a whole wall up of his victims ready for the detective to find at the last moment. Or the counterpart to the murder wall, that of the wall of victims and locations found in the detective office crime wall. Technically, these kind of walls are only found in fiction or nowadays as a prop for murder mystery game parties. But both the murder and detective crazy walls are a combination of an inspiration wall and that of a writer’s wall – sometimes a writer’s wall looks very similar to a murder wall, believe me.
So here’s my collection of what I consider the best of the inspiration walls. These have design and purpose, and many are as much part of the office design as other elements in the room. If you have the space in your own creative work studios and offices, try one out and see if they work. Inspiration “Walls” are fun to collect and arrange, and should be fun (and inspiring!) to look at every day.
With many of us WFHing (working from home) through Covid-19 lockdowns, how our home office looks, feels and functions is vitally important, and the Japandi and Zen influences in design gives us one way through these times.
Hello, I'm Michelle aka Pacific Blue. I've been creating content on the internet for the last two decades about productivity, crafting, design and tools. I'm now a fiction writer, but too full of ideas and creativity to stop being a creator.
Recent Comments