The main purpose of retail design is to attract the customer’s attention and guide him or her to various departments. Nothing does this as well as color, familiar imagery, and the written word. Other elements of design such as contrast between the sizes of shapes, three-dimensionality against a flat surface, and leading lines help accomplish this as well.
But only murals combine all of these key attracting elements into one dramatic décor feature.
Like the original signs that hung outside of merchant’s buildings since ancient times, butchers, bakers, fishmongers, prepared food vendors, and charcuteries still tend to utilize pictorial describers of what their
wares and services are.
Through a coincidence of form and function, service departments such as prepared foods, bakeries, fishmongers, cafes, and butchers, which provide the most esthetically pleasing products to illustrate with murals, are most often constructed along the perimeters of stores. This gives retailers an ample canvas to work on!
The department with the most space and material for inspiration for murals is Produce.
With two superwide-format hybrid inkjet printers often running 24 hours a day, Off the Wall is equipped to create murals on a variety of substrate: anything from EPVC plastics to foam board or vinyl, to wood boards or corrugated metal.
There are certainly other things that design in retail is meant to accomplish, such as setting a mood. But the battle for the customer’s eye is often at the top that list, and the use of pictures is an essential tool in a designer’s satchel.
Sometimes it's just the power of an image that will attract a customer's attention. Other times, the written word becomes a graphic
Key among all the design elements meant to capture a customer's attention is color, especially color differentiated or more saturated than its background and surroundings.
In this article we have been defining a mural as a decor feature that consists of a graphic or picture, either abstract or literal, that has been printed on substrate and applied to a wall.
But closely related to murals in function are the large back-lit signs that Off The Wall has decades of experience designing, fabricating, and installing.
Murals that are lit from behind with either flourescent tubes or LED
Off The Wall. We do it all.