So I got bored staring at the drab walls in my office. They needed a little lift – and so did I.
The Long Wall
This wall was my inspiration for the whole project. It was like a moment straight out of Officespace. I just got so tired of how sterile and boring the office felt – so I did something about it.
A View of the Office from My Desk
It’s easy to see how plain the walls are. The up-side is that we had a ton of space to work with. We knew painting would take forever and would be difficult to remove, etc. Post-its proved to be a perfect and inexpensive solution.
Plain Old Vanilla Wall
I wanted to see something playful and inspiring. After several discussions with my co-workers, we finally settled on superheroes. After all, who doesn’t have one? We were super excited and started designing characters right away.
Wonder Woman
Superheroes are strong, inspiring and fun. They are iconic and recognizable figures for everyone. The best part was that we got to design them ourselves.
Superman
We thought they also looked sorta cool with large heads and little bodies. They looked sort of like kids dressing up!
Captain America
Once I developed a character model, I based the other characters off of the same proportions.
Scarlet Witch
She seemed like a perfect way to bring up the estrogen levels.
Iron Man
The sparks were flying! It was totally fun trying to figure out how get all the details inside such a small pixel grid (only 34 Post-Its high!)
Spidey
He’s one of our favorites.
Batkid?
Far Wall Mock-Up
We did some mock-ups to figure out the scale and position of the pieces. It looked pretty sweet, so we kept going.
Endless Notes
In total, the designs required 8,024 Post-Its in total. Once we calculated the sum of each color, we placed our order. Some only came in assortment packs with other colors, so we decided on some of the backgrounds based on the excess. I ended up purchasing about 9,000 notes – our budget was around $300.
Finally Taking Shape
Some of us came in over the weekend to construct the murals. First, we did the top line of each character panel. Then we used that row to create the rest of the grid spanning the whole wall. We taped them to keep the grid as straight as possible. At first, the task felt daunting, as the process was slow. But we powered through!
It was so exciting to see this one come to life.
All done!
We were just beginning to make progress.
We were about halfway done with the large wall.
It started going much faster after more people arrived.
Spiderman coming together.
Help was enjoyed from all sorts of folks!
The finished piece of art! (See if you can spot the man wearing camouflage.)
Wonder Woman mid-leap
An aerial view
Here’s another shot from near my desk.
A view looking down the corridor from the kitchen.
Spiderman and Batman together.
The entire wall.
Me with my heroes.
With people in and out helping all day, I didn’t get any shots of everyone together (bummer)
It was awesome being able to see it become a reality. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback as people from all over the building have been coming over to check it out. A big thanks to everyone who helped!
