A company history display is a helpful resource for onboarding new employees and showcasing your storied past to visitors and clients. Universities have long found them useful for prospective student tours, and their use has been adopted by the corporate world.
The first step for a project like this is determining what story you'd like to tell. Someone from the company will have to choose the milestone dates that will be featured and source any photo assets available from those times. The length of time being covered and the number of items highlighted will determine the overall size and complexity of the display.
The history wall at Sub-Zero showcases their entire company timeline using acrylic panels and dimensional numbers to highlight important milestones and the evolution of their brand.
Note that if you plan to add to your display over time to make it an evergreen display, make sure you leave blank space at the end of the timeline for future panel additions.
However, you don't have to put your entire history on display. You can choose to highlight only a single important event. Summit Credit Union chose to create a wall that told the story of the construction of their new corporate headquarters, from groundbreaking to ribbon cutting.
Not much for words? Consider just doing a wallpaper collage of photos to represent your company history. Two contrasting walls at Suttle-Straus show what work life was like in the 20th century and what it is like today.
If you have an actual artifact from your company's history you can incorporate it into a display, like Fiskars did with this antique plow. Real items can give a history displays a museum-like feel.
Similarly, Palmer Johnson created a history wall for their lobby that framed an actual machinery display in the foreground. They used tone-on-tone custom printed wallpaper and black and white opaque acrylic panels with standoffs as dimensional components, while letting the machinery be the star of the show.
History walls don't have to be complicated. For example, this simple wall display highlights three images of a work building over different decades. Images were printed on acrylic and hung with metal standoffs.
As shown by these examples, history walls can be made at difference sizes and different budgets depending on the materials. Want to see more ideas for your office space? Check out our Displays and Signage Portfolio.
