For many brands, a mural communicates far more than a mission statement ever could. Lobby murals draw reactions from every new hire; visitors describe an identity wall to their peers. But as modern branding in corporate office environments gets more intentional, the question has shifted. It’s no longer just “What should go on the wall?” Today, it’s “How do we create a spatial experience?”
Why Murals Matter in Corporate Spaces
A strong visual anchor, whether a typographic piece, an abstract treatment in the brand’s palette, or a historical timeline along a key corridor, tells visitors, clients, and employees what a company values, its mission, and the collaborative culture it’s building.
Across the world, companies and communities are already doing this in real ways. Commissioned branding murals, brand-integrated graphics, and custom installations are all increasingly common as organizations try to make their spaces feel distinct through clear design principles.
The harder part is building something that grows with the brand. The installations that hold up are built on story before style. That’s where mechanical installations excel.
For more on how companies are using their physical spaces as brand storytelling platforms, see our guide to visual identity design in office spaces.
The Rogers Centre features a 5 Row by 17 Column Picture Flap as a kinetic stadium wall mural.
Picture Flap can include imagery, art, or illustrations, as shown on the display for Boston Children’s Hospital.
The Longevity Problem
Murals look great at installation, but they’re surprisingly hard to maintain. Touch-ups often don’t blend well with the original design. Leadership changes, office relocations, or brand updates can make the design feel dated within as little as one product cycle, and fixing it usually costs nearly as much as the initial installation.
Vinyl murals offer greater flexibility but also bring their own set of issues, such as bubbling, edge peeling, UV fading, and quality problems at scale. They’re also a poor fit for high-traffic areas where humidity and daily contact are a reality.
The real problem with both approaches is that they’re fixed. Once installed, they can’t change without major effort, and for growing brands, that rigidity has a real cost.
Coachella’s countdown clock, using Picture Flap, served as an experiential, functional “moving mural.”
The University of Arizona rotates through local photography, logos, and university stats on its kinetic Picture Flap mural.
Placemaking in Corporate Spaces
Another goal of many modern organizations is placemaking. While the term “placemaking” has evolved over the years from its origins in urban planning, it has remained rooted in designing spaces around people and communities. In corporate spaces, it means bringing the organization’s purpose to life while involving the people who use the space, customers, employees, and the wider community. The ideal result is an environment that reflects them while supporting connection, expression, and belonging.
While historically, murals have been a great way to establish this sense of community and place, many brands are seeking future-proof design investments, as we’ve seen in our conversations for Picture Flap installations.
Brand Infrastructure That Evolves
What if your branding could evolve right alongside the company? That’s exactly what a mechanical display such as Picture Flap solves.
As the only US-based manufacturer that customizes these displays, we’ve built flap installations for companies such as Google, Netflix, and Starbucks. These displays do what a corporate office mural does: anchor a space, express brand identity, and create a memorable experience, but with the critical advantage of being easily updatable.
The kinetic Picture Flap mural at Heritage Towers rotates through Texas imagery, icons, photography, and art, honoring local culture and community.
Joliet Museum uses a kinetic mural to draw attention to imagery and historical photos of Route 66.
What is Picture Flap?
Picture Flap is an all-image mechanical system. Built on the same split-flap mechanics as the classic Solari departure boards, it cycles through images rather than text.
The result is a kinetic mural that actually moves! Brand photography, archival imagery, product visuals, or abstract sequences either rotate on a schedule or update through Portal, our content management system included with every display.
That flexibility matters in theory, but even more in practice. A company celebrating an anniversary can surface its company history through archival imagery, then switch to a display of neighborhood history to reflect its deep community roots. A tech brand can rotate visuals that demonstrate its culture and global reach. None of this requires calling anyone back for retouching or tearing anything down.
The University of Arizona’s Picture Flap installation demonstrates how this works at scale, creating a prominent focal point that communicates institutional identity and pride in a way a static surface simply couldn’t.
For a deeper look at the mechanical display tradition that Picture Flap continues, see our blog post on the rich history of the Solari board.
From Identity Wall to Brand Anchor
The best corporate office murals do more than decorate. They give people something to point to. For companies undergoing a redesign, a new buildout, or a flagship launch, the most useful early question is whether the planned focal point can evolve.
Rather than representing modern branding infrastructure, a static-imagery mural is, in reality, a timer-controlled decoration. By comparison, a Picture Flap installation built to order and engineered to last for decades is an investment that becomes more meaningful the longer it’s in place.
As Corgan notes in their 2025 Architecture Yearbook, workplace design has evolved from purely functional spaces into environments that communicate who companies are and what they stand for. The Walker Center installation in Salt Lake City demonstrates this principle at a lobby scale and represents what the best office murals have always tried to be.
Ready to see what Picture Flap could do for your space? Book a demo with our team and let’s start the conversation.
