Creating Inspiration Walls in your Home Office
The wall may contain many different things. It may be a wall filled with favorite quotes or much-loved pictures. It may be a wall with a big corkboard that allows us to tear out inspiration from magazines, tack it up and then take it down when it doesn't inspire us anymore. It may be a neat and clean wall of books in a bookcase or it may be a chaotic mess of this and that taped from floor to ceiling.
It doesn't matter what you choose to do when creating your own wall of inspiration. What matters is that you give yourself the permission to do this. Your home office has to be professional and functional but it also has to be inspiring. One of the joys of working from home is that you can decorate this space however you please without worrying about offending corporate bosses. Revel in that!
Your wall doesn't actually have to have anything at all on it most of the time. If you want to pick and choose when you can see something inspiring on your wall then choose a white wall that's large enough to hold images from a projector. You can play films on the wall or create your own inspiring image sets to play on the wall when you need inspiration. When you're ready to work you can turn off the projector, turn the lights back on and get down to business.
Sometimes the things that inspire you are actually the tools that you work with. Use a hanging board to put them on display. This person works with scissors and tape. Even if you work primarily with laptops you can hang some accessories on display. (USB sticks, notebooks and chargers are good examples.) Get creative!
If the 3D things that you are most inspired by don't really fit well onto a set of shelves then you may want to designate a corner of the room for them rather than using an entire wall. This little corner display allows you to be inspired by a series of three-dimensional large objects without having the source of inspiration overtake the rest of the office!
On the other hand, some people need a big mess on the walls to truly be inspired. If you limit your messiness to just this one wall then you can cater to your urge to create chaos without actually turning your whole office upside down. If you work well in the midst of some mess but don't want your whole office to be a disaster then an inspiring wall like this seems like an ideal solution.
Some people would find the first image posted here to be too distracting even if the desk was turned away from it. For those people who like a neat and clean office it's still possible to do framed inspiration photos. I love this set of colorful paintings that are all hung in the same type of frame and spaced evenly in rows on the wall. Are you inspired by this?
Perhaps the easiest way to create a wall of inspiration is to frame the pictures that inspire you most. These may be pictures of people you know, famous people you admire or places that inspire you. I like this setup where the desk faces away from the inspiration wall so that you aren't distracted by it but can easily turn around to gather inspiration from it.
What if the wall that inspires you isn't a wall at all? If you can choose a home office design that gives you an entire wall of windows (even if it's a small space) then you may find that all the inspiration that you need will filter in to your from outside.
Q