Refreshing an office space can deliver many benefits, including increased productivity, client engagement, and employee morale. The work required to refresh a workspace can be proportional to these benefits, but it doesn’t have to be! Offices of any size can refresh their spaces without full redesigns, using subtle strategies to breathe new life into their lobbies, halls, conference rooms, and more.
When refreshing an office space, review these five simple ways to get the benefits of a full redesign without paying the full cost. Making a positive impact on an office environment can start with simple design decisions.
1. Update Colors to Craft the Mood
Color plays an essential role in setting the tone of the workspace, and it’s one of the easiest aspects to redesign. Repainting walls, adding accent walls, changing the colors of cushions, or commissioning a custom 3D office sign can dramatically change the energy of the office without a full redesign.
- To choose the right colors for the space, business owners should consider the simple but effective impact of color psychology. According to this theory, colors and hues impact human behavior in several ways:
Blue and white: Can induce feelings of calmness - Green: May produce feelings of balance and creativity
- Red and yellow: Can contribute to an atmosphere of energy, optimism, or passion
2. Create Custom Focal Points to Engage Visitors
Office spaces can be refreshed with new visual centerpieces that draw visitors’ eyes and communicate a message. A custom office sign can be customized to feature the company’s logo or mission statement, adding a personal, creative touch. They can also feature quotations or imagery that evokes the business’s unique brand identity.
Dimensional metal office signs can create more engaging lobbies, hallways, meeting spaces, and workspaces where visitors, employees, and clients form immediate relationships with the brand. By combining artistry, messaging, and branding, reception areas can become more inviting and structured. Conference rooms can become more engaging. These focal points bring people together without any structural changes, and they help office owners communicate with their guests, clients, and employees organically.
3. Incorporate Nature to Improve Well-Being
Natural elements like plants produce a well-known calming effect due to our long history of interacting with the natural world. This relationship can become a simple hack for office redesigners, who can utilize natural elements to boost productivity and well-being without major changes.
Low-maintenance plants like snake plants or pothos can be incorporated into the design, but less drastic choices can be just as effective. The simple addition of the color green in accent schemes can harness some of the same relaxing effect. Natural materials like wood and stone can be incorporated into the decor or mimicked in the pattern of a unique office sign.
Visually incorporating natural designs like floral, vine, and leaf patterns into engaging dimensional art can make spaces more calming, interesting, and unique. Office art or signs with natural tones, such as brushed metal, can create interesting focal points that designers can use to their advantage, even without incorporating real plants into their offices.
4. Refresh the Lighting to Increase Productivity and Comfort
Lighting significantly impacts the mood of an office space, providing an opportunity to refresh the environment without a costly redesign. Studies have shown that harsh, artificial lighting like fluorescent bulbs can feel mentally draining due to people’s natural instinct to be in outdoor lighting. Offices can utilize these mental instincts to their advantage by swapping out dated lighting fixtures for more natural alternatives.
These can include ambient, accent, and task lights, placed strategically to avoid feeling intrusive. Comfortable, dynamic lighting that is layered into the space and focused on functionality can help employees feel focused without becoming drained. Another option is to use real natural light by repositioning desks, opening the blinds, or changing the window coverings to take advantage of daylight.
5. Declutter to Create a More Inviting Workplace
Decluttering an office can create an effective refresh without any design changes at all. Rather than adding a new element, office owners can remove clutter from desks and storage areas or buy in-built storage solutions to reduce chaos and streamline their workflows.
The same effect can be achieved simply by rearranging furniture or investing in digital filing systems. This gets pen and paper clutter out of the way and helps employees move, think, and work in their space more easily. By using the same logic on the walls, office managers can replace cluttered wall decor with custom office signs for a cleaner, more controlled, more focused space.
Communicate Your Office Goals with Custom Design Solutions
ShieldCo Art’s team of artists knows that office redesigns are expensive endeavors with limited ROI. Our goal is to help office owners achieve the most positive impact on their offices with the least amount of expensive redesigning. Custom office signs provide opportunities to add multi-dimensional focal points with new materials and color schemes to take advantage of some of these simple redesign benefits.
At ShieldCo Art, we offer a personalized approach to communicating a brand’s values through simple office refreshes. Contact our team of artists to learn how quality craftsmanship can be used to refresh a workplace environment with less intrusion than a full redesign.