One of the most powerful ways to create an impact in your business premises is through the walls. The walls are an untapped canvas in many offices, shops, and manufacturing premises, with the potential to reflect a unique brand identity in support of a wide range of your business objectives. However, what is the best way of going about transforming your walls, short of setting your employees loose with a paintbrush? Should you go for versatile custom printed wallcoverings, or choose the creative individuality of a bespoke painted mural? Let’s explore how each option can support your goals, brands, and budget.
Custom Printed Wall Coverings: Practicality Meets Style
Custom printed vinyl wall graphics or wallcoverings are a practical and scalable way to personalise or refresh large wall areas. Produced using high-quality digital printing methods onto vinyl or another similar substrate, printed vinyl wall graphics are suitable for blanketing extensive walls or multiple rooms while delivering a consistent and high-spec finish throughout your entire premises.
Why Invest In Custom Printed Wallcoverings?
1. Cost-effective at scale
Digital printing now makes it affordable for businesses to cover large-scale spaces, making custom graphics perfect for offices, retail environments, bars, hospitality areas and health clubs. You name it, there is a graphic we can produce for it.
2. Endless design options
Almost any pattern, logo, photo, or branding element can be produced at scale to reinforce your business’s personality and deliver the intended messages to your customers and employees.
3. Straightforward to install and update
One of the joys of modern graphics is the way that even large installations can be installed quickly by a professional team, with minimal disruption to your business. For the largest graphics, individual sections can be installed and replaced independently, making them perfect for future rebranding or to repair damage.
4. Low maintenance
Vinyl is an excellent substrate for printed graphics. It is impact, scratch, scuff, and stain resistant, and all it needs is the occasional clean and dust – making it a hassle-free option for high traffic areas.The flexibility of printed wallcoverings extends to updating your space as your brand grows or changes. Installations are neat and efficient, giving you a professional-looking and reliable solution for transforming wall spaces into an immersive branding canvas.
Bespoke Painted Wall Murals: Creative Impact And Unique Personality
What about bespoke wall murals? Bespoke wall murals are usually designed and created manually by a professional artist, a variation of the ‘employee with a brush’ scenario we mentioned earlier. A custom mural can truly make your space one-of-a-kind, but compared to a printed bespoke graphic, a bespoke mural is time and resource-intensive, with a far higher cost and lead time associated with it.
So, Why Choose A Bespoke Wall Mural?
1. Standout uniqueness
Each mural is custom-tailored to your space and business story, making your environment instantly memorable and distinctive.
2. Brand storytelling
A professional mural artist will be able to weave your business history, mission, or even local identity into the artwork, helping forge long-term and authentic emotional connections with your customers and the people who work for you.
3. Long-term investment
While the initial cost is higher than a printed graphic, the end result could deliver long-term value, ageing gracefully and expressing your identity for years to come. On the other hand, the mural could age pretty quickly, making your choice of subject matter extremely important.
4. Adapt to your architecture
For unusual layouts and awkwardly shaped walls, a bespoke mural may be more practical than standardised printed graphics. An experienced artist will use the curves, corners, and surface features of your space as assets rather than challenges, integrating the mural seamlessly into your premises.Bespoke painted murals are artisan to the core, and are sometimes found in boutique retail shops, creative studios, and other places aiming to offer a unique and memorable visitor experience. The process is more involved and the expense reflects this, but the end product is a genuine work of art.
Key Considerations
Your key consideration is whether or not you need the expense and intricacy of a bespoke painted mural, or if a custom graphic could serve your purpose just as well. Consider the following factors:
Budget
Printed wallcoverings are perfect for larger spaces and repeated branding across multiple venues. This is often prohibitively expensive with bespoke murals due to the high cost of the artist’s time and specialist materials.
Timeline
How long do you have? Printed options can be designed, produced, and installed fairly rapidly, making them perfect for timely launches and re-brands, and for when you can’t afford much downtime to beautify the office. Murals require extensive time for concept development, artist collaboration, and the creative process itself.
Flexibility and maintenance
Printed wallcoverings are often modular, with sections that can be replaced or updated when needed. With a hand-painted mural, while it can be touched up with a paintbrush from time to time, maintenance is generally more time-consuming, and the product itself is more easily damaged. You will also usually require the original artist to conduct the repairs, or someone with similar skills.
What Next?
In most cases, a custom-designed, high-quality printed graphic makes more sense than a hand-painted mural. To discuss your options in detail with one of our experienced design team, please contact MTA Digital today by clicking here, or feel free to call us on 020 3835 4473.
Image source: Canva
