Office wall art that says precision without saying it.

What artwork for office walls should do

Office artwork is usually chosen to fill a wall and then never looked at again. The works that survive daily viewing are the ones with something to find on the tenth look: the ledger lines, the compass arcs, the small numbers along a spiral. The construction-drawing series — The Sovereign Ledger, The Chronos Equation, The Engineer's Astrolabe, The Celestial Blueprint — was drawn for exactly that. Gold on black for a dark reception or a boardroom; the white and blueprint series for open-plan floors and pale meeting rooms.

For a law firm, an architect, an engineer, a clinic's management floor or a financial office, the subject matters: it says method, measure and patience, without a slogan.

Reception, boardroom, open plan

• Reception: one large work behind or opposite the desk, at the golden section of the wall — large artwork for office walls should be sized by the wall, width divided by 1.618. 120–180 cm is typical.
• Boardroom, executive office: a single work the people at the table face, 100–140 cm, the darker series. Executive office wall art works best when it is the only thing on that wall.
• Meeting rooms: one work per room from one collection, so the rooms are related but not identical.
• Open-plan and corridors: a series of three to five, same size and frame, one side of the corridor. Blueprint Fibonacci reads well in daylight.

Surface and framing

For an office, fine-art paper with a deep mat and a thin black or brass frame is the quietest finish and reads as “considered”. For a reception that sees deliveries and trolleys, acrylic face-mount or aluminium. Files are 9,000 px on the long edge as standard and up to 12,750 px on the largest works, so a two-metre reception piece prints cleanly. Any corporate print supplier produces these from the file.

The licence, plainly

An office with clients or visitors is a commercial space, so each work needs the commercial licence: €377 per work, per office, for the life of the office, any size and surface, any number of prints within that office. A signed certificate names the work, the licensee and the premises, which is what facilities or procurement will file. A company with several offices licenses each location; from three works, ask for the project rate.