Office Wall Art

Office Wall Art, Including the Wall Behind You on Calls

Home offices now have a second audience nobody planned for: everyone on the other end of a video call. The wall behind your chair is seen by colleagues and clients for hours a week, which makes it the most-viewed wall in most houses and the one people think about least.

For that wall specifically, a few things help. One piece rather than several, because a camera flattens depth and a gallery wall turns into visual noise on screen. Position it off-centre behind your shoulder rather than directly behind your head, where it reads as a halo. Avoid very high contrast or busy detail, which video compression handles badly and which pulls attention off your face. And check what it actually looks like on camera before committing — cameras crop tighter than you expect, and half a picture behind someone’s head looks worse than none.

The wall you face is a different problem. That one is about sustained attention rather than impression: it is in your eyeline for hours, so it should be something you can look at without irritation and, ideally, something with a bit of depth to rest your eyes on. There is a reasonable argument for a landscape here purely on the grounds of giving your eyes a distant thing to focus on between screens.

Keep the desk wall itself relatively clear. Anything directly above a monitor competes with the screen for attention all day, which is exactly what you do not want.

Whatever you choose for the call wall, join a meeting and look at yourself first. Two minutes of that will settle position and scale better than any rule of thumb.