Elementary School Hallway Mural for Vista Verde Academy

About This Project

Objective: Vista Verde Academy wanted to transform a long, windowless hallway into an engaging environment that reflects the school's values of curiosity, creativity, and community.

Design Approach: We designed a continuous illustrated mural featuring diverse students exploring science, art, nature, and literature, rendered in a vibrant but cohesive color palette that energizes without overwhelming.

Vista Verde Academy is a charter elementary school in La Habra with a strong emphasis on project-based learning. The school occupies a renovated commercial building, and while the classrooms have been thoughtfully designed, the main hallway connecting them was an afterthought — eighty feet of blank beige drywall with fluorescent lighting. Students walked through it dozens of times a day, and it contributed nothing to the learning environment.

We collaborated with the school’s art teacher and a student advisory committee to develop a mural concept that reflects what makes Vista Verde unique. The design follows a narrative arc across the full corridor: on one end, students are depicted reading and asking questions; in the middle, they’re experimenting, building, and creating; and at the far end, they’re sharing their work with the community. The illustration style is colorful and contemporary — detailed enough to reward close looking, but graphic enough to read clearly from a distance.

Because the hallway sees heavy foot traffic from students, parents, and staff, durability was a key consideration. Direct-to-wall printing bonds with the drywall surface in a way that resists scuffing and can be cleaned without damage, making it far more practical than a hand-painted mural in a school setting. The installation was completed over a long weekend, and students returned to a hallway that felt completely transformed. Teachers have since incorporated the mural into lessons, asking students to find details and tell stories about what they see.