41 Unique Office Bulletin Board Ideas Your Team Will Love (2024)

Top 5 Bulletin Board Myths (and Why they’re Untrue)

There are lots of myths about bulletin boards that are just not true:

1. Bulletin boards are just for schools

You might think of bulletin boards and think of primary school teachers working through summer vacation to make educational displays for the kids, but bulletin boards are not just for schools. Bulletin boards provide a tactile and visual way of informing an audience, whether you are a community college, hospital, cafe, youth club, office, or any other place where people gather.

2. There’s no point making a bulletin board because everything can be done using technology now

There is so much so much technology at our fingertips, you’d be forgiven for thinking there is no place for them in the modern world. But, used properly, a bulletin board serves as an amazing tool for team bonding, information sharing, and goal tracking, and can make a beautiful to your general office decor.

3. You need to be creative to make a bulletin board

Our ideas have made the creativity bit easy. Just check out our list and see which resonate with you. Some have more instructions than others, so if you feel your creative skills are lacking a little, choose one that has more direction.

4. Making a nice board will be a lot of hard work

Bulletin boards don’t have to be hard work. We have made sure that all of our ideas can be crafted simply. However, if you have the time and motivation to spend more time on the board, you can take each of these ideas and expand on them. A bulletin board is only as much work as the creator wants to put into it.

5. It will be weird to add a bulletin board when we haven’t had one before

It might feel strange at first to be putting up a large display when we have never had one before, but your team will love it. To help your team adjust, choose a board that you feel will really interest your team. You could also consider setting it up over the weekend so your team comes into work for a great surprise.

Proper Bulletin Board Etiquette (and mistakes to avoid!)

If you’ve ever seen a bulletin board packed with out-of-date leaflets pinned to it, you know how to do a bulletin board wrong. The biggest mistake when making a board is for it to get cluttered. You want to make sure your board has a focus.

We recommend choosing just three sections. These can be three panels or three large squares placed along the diagonal (see our example below) —or any other way that suits you. You don’t want your audience to be overwhelmed, so avoid putting up too much, especially anything with small text.

Ideally, you want to be able to read almost everything on the bulletin board while standing at least two meters back from it. It’s also important both the creator of the board—and the rest of the team—follow a few pieces of etiquette:

• Be mindful of food and drink around the board
• Don’t write directly on the board
• Regularly add new things to your board and remember to take down anything that isn’t relevant anymore—your team will stop paying attention to it if they know the information is usually out of date
• Advise that your team don’t block the board with other objects
• Listen to the feedback from your team and make changes if you find there are areas they do not feel helpful
• Spend 10 minutes every week maintaining your board
• Be careful of the placement of your board—don’t block fire exits and be mindful of high traffic areas where your board could get in the way

3 Main Bulletin Board Categories: Which is Yours?

There are three main types of bulletin boards; informative, interactive, and decorative.

1. Informative Boards
   

An informative board mainly focuses on providing information to the audience. Examples of informative boards could be ones displaying information on health or fitness or giving advice for the camping season. The key to making a great informative board is making sure the text is easily readable, that each bit of information is valuable to the reader, and that it includes some hard facts (which might be in the form of graphs or infographics). This will make sure that your board has really served its purpose of providing information.

2. Interactive Boards

These are often a team’s favorite board because they are engaging. An interactive board has many purposes, but at its core, they are designed for interaction between the board and the audience. This might be by using magnets to move items around the board or writing things on it. Our ballot board idea further down is the perfect example of an interactive board. You want to make sure that your interactive board has plenty of opportunities for everyone to get involved.

3. Decorative Boards

Before you start creating your bulletin board, make sure you have an idea of which category yours falls under. This will keep you on track and make sure your board has the impact intended.

Once you have figured out your intention with the board, you can make it (that’s the fun bit).

How to Make a Bulletin Board

Long gone are the days when bulletin boards just meant a dull corkboard in the corner of an office gathering dust.

Bulletin boards can be made from almost anything—use this to your advantage by making your bulletin board as unique as your place of work. For example, maybe you run a clothing company or a laundry company—why not make your bulletin board out of some plywood, with rows of brown string, using wooden pegs to hold each section?

If you run a tutoring company, you could use a blackboard as a background, wrap a corkboard in color fabric for a sewing company, or fashion brass pipe into a frame for a plumbing company.

Or maybe you own a mechanics garage, so a sheet of metal and magnets would better reflect your business.

The creativity options are endless!

All you need is something to serve as a background and a way of attaching pieces of paper—like posters, leaflets, and notes—to the board.

Step One—Brainstorm Ideas

Grab a piece of paper and some trusted colleagues for a consult, and write down all of the ideas you have for a bulletin board. You can use this time to establish the basics; where will your board go, how often you will maintain it, and who will be responsible.

Step Two—Establish a Gap and Identify Your Aims

Have a think about your team. Is there a gap somewhere? Perhaps you have recently had a divisive topic split the team, and you could do with some team bonding, or maybe your morale is a little low, and everyone could do with something to lift their spirits. Using your brainstormed ideas from the first step, find out what you would like to fix and how your board can tie into this. This is also a good time to establish what type of board you are building and use this to guide your creation.

Step Three—Sketch a Design

Draw a rough sketch of how you would like to design your board and start collecting materials. This will mean you have an idea of how you are going to execute your plan, and it will make sure you have everything you need. There is nothing more frustrating than getting halfway through your project to realize you are missing some of the key bits you need.

Step Four—Personalization

Once you have designed how you are going to make your physical bulletin board, you can get to personalize it! This is the fun bit.

• Get some decorative push pins—like flowers, bees, or flags
• Sort out some basics like construction paper, tape, felt tip pens, acrylic paint, envelopes, sticky notes, and paper decorations
• Use a free tool like Canva to design titles and subtitles in colors and fonts that match your company logo (it’s worth saving your templates so you can reuse your designs)
• For small teams you could set up a permanent corner of the bulletin board with polaroid photos taken of your team with their names/role/an interesting fact about them, to introduce them to new team members and office visitors
• Use different arts and crafts material like decorative tape to make a bulletin board border
• Consider the location of your board—will it be acting as a welcome for visitors or will it be ‘behind the scenes’ for the eyes of your team only?
• Use scrap pieces of wrapping paper/wallpaper for backgrounds or to cut out letters
• Take note of national days (like the 4th of July) or world days (such as International Women’s Day), or other annual days relevant to your work as an excuse to jazz up the bulletin board.

Step Five—Crunch Time!

Time to get to making your bulletin board!

41 Bulletin Board Ideas That’ll Get Noticed

Some of these ideas you can use as an entire bulletin board, but others you may want to use as a section. If you use them as sections, think about mixing and matching similar themes—like wildlife, oceans, and Earth could make for an aesthetic spring bulletin board idea.

Interactive and Collaborative Bulletin Boards

These interactive bulletin boards are designed to bring your team together and bring some joy into your work day.

1. The Ballot Board

The ballot board is all about voting and is a fun way to get to know your teammates better.

To make this board, it is easiest if you use a large whiteboard and magnetic disks. Divide it into two or more sections, with different options written at the top. Some examples could be:

• Cats vs. dogs,
• Beach holiday vs. city break
• Marvel vs. DC
• Night out vs. night in
• Cake vs. pie
• Pirates vs. ninjas
• Early bird vs. night owl
  

If your team seems engaged with this bulletin board, consider running a different question every day.

You could even use this bulletin board idea to vote on more important decisions, such as what direction the team moves with their latest project, or where the annual work party should be held this year.

However you use it, try to avoid anything too personal or too political and keep the topics light and entertaining.

2. Recipe Roundup

This idea is great for the foodies, and you can link it with a health section if you want to get your team into healthy eating.

Design the background and border of this bulletin board around the theme of food. Using a colorful background, add photos and cutouts of different fruit, vegetables, and dishes from around the world.

Use the main body of the board to display a title—‘Recipe Roundup’ or ‘Recipe Exchange’, for example. Then a small explainer telling your audience they can leave a recipe and take a recipe. You could start off your board with a few recipes of your own.

It is a good idea to leave an envelope of scrap paper pinned to the bottom so people can write out their own recipes, but encourage people to print recipes too.

3. Collaborative Artwork

This board is a bit unusual, but can work great to promote teamwork, sharing ideas, and being creative—it also means very little input from the creator. All you need to do is provide the materials, and a starting point, and see where your collaborative artwork takes you. Maybe you start by painting the outline of a mountain, and then leave a selection of felt tip pens, paints, and brushes, for your colleagues.

Or go a bit more abstract—paint a small colored shape in the middle of the board. Remember to leave instructions for your team that they are free to join in with the art piece.

4. Your Travel Adventures

The background for this bulletin board idea will just be a world map. Either draw this yourself, if you are particularly good at drawing, or go online to find an outline. Ask your colleagues to bring in photos of their travels and provide push pins for them to attach their images to the map.

This is a great way of bringing your team together to reflect on some of their favorite memories.

Start off your board similar to the example below, and build it up with small photographs and maybe even souvenirs if your teammates are willing to add them.

Source: The Creative Librarian

Team-Building Bulletin Board Ideas

The following ideas work great stand-alone but even better as sections of a larger bulletin board. Experiment with different features and see which your team finds most engaging.

5. Community Connections

Best for a section of a board or as a complete board in the middle of summer when days are packed with different events, this bulletin board is designed to highlight local events and resources in the surrounding community.

This can include information about volunteer opportunities, new cafes opening nearby, sports days, fetes, school plays, and the list goes on and on. The fun part about this board is you really have complete creative freedom when it comes to how you piece it together.

Go wild on colorful acrylic paint in the background, or just leave it plain, this board is purely about sharing information and bringing people together and doesn’t need much more than just a little bit of community spirit.

6. Brain Teasers

Here’s a riddle for you: A cat can not fit through the green glass door, but a kitten can. You can take carrots with you through the green glass door, but not onions.

What else can you take through the green glass door? If you’re stumped, maybe it is time to exercise your team’s skills in logic and reason. Lateral thinking games can work great for this, but there are more simple math and English brain teasers. A good starter is dingbats—visual word clues.

This bulletin board idea works well as a section as it can encourage a bit of healthy competition amongst your team, as well as keep them engaged with the board in general.

7. Selfie Station

Try to link your props to your board. For example, if the props are holiday themed, make the background a beach.

8. Pet of the Month

Source: Pima Animal Care

Health and Wellness Bulletin Board Ideas

These ideas will encourage your team to think about their wellness—after all, a healthy team is a happy team, and a happy team is a productive team^{1https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/new_study_shows/#:~:text=Economists%20carried%20out%20a%20number,of%20Warwick%20led%20the%20research.}.

9. Mindful Moments

This bulletin board fosters a culture of mindfulness and self-care by providing tips, ideas, and resources. For this board, you could have one big mindfulness quote in the center (check out this list here if you need some inspiration) and cover the border with different mindfulness activities or resources for people to take.

You can get really creative for the border of a mindfulness-moments-themed board—you could use leaf-shaped sticky notes or pin-up ‘mystery mindfulness’ envelopes.

10. Heart Health

Another bulletin board that is great to tie in with an internationally recognized day (World Heart Day on the 29th of September), this board can be really bright and colorful as well as informative.

If you are stuck on how to start off your heart health board, why not center a large image of a heart? From there, you can pack the board with information. You can look for free graphics on websites like American Heart Association.

11. Self-Care Board

This idea works nicely for school bulletin boards as well as in an office. Anywhere there are people, there are people who need self-care. Get a few different colored envelopes (an even number works best, 6 or 8, but up to 10 or 12 would work if your board is big enough).

On each envelope, write a different category, and inside fill it with ideas for self-care. If you have a budget, you could give your teammates a little gift with each idea.

For example, you could do the categories as:

Physical well-being—a day pass at a local gym

Emotional well-being—an hour with a therapist/counselor

Social connections and relationship well-being—a voucher for two coffees at a local coffee shop

Spiritual or religious well-being—a yoga or meditation class

12. The Great Outdoors

A nature-themed bulletin board that highlights nearby hiking camping spots, as well as hiking trails and other outdoor activities, this board encourages your team to get outside and enjoy it. Studies^{2https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/04/nurtured-nature} show this is great for both our mental health and our physical health.

If you’re particularly artsy this is really your time to shine as you decorate your backdrop with an outdoors theme—towering trees made from felt, blue lakes with crumpled crepe paper, and clouds made from cotton wool.

Camping brings back so many nostalgic memories for people, so why not really let your inner child get involved with this one?

Once you’ve designed your background, you will want to make sure that you’ve posted outdoor information. Check Find a Campground for a site near you, and make sure you leave some space to put some information on how to prevent forest fires.

13. Take What You Need

We love this board for the beautiful handmade flowers and the colorful envelope pockets.

Source: Meghan Donahue

Motivational and Inspirational Bulletin Board Ideas

If you’re looking for bulletin board ideas to keep your team focused with their eye on the prize at all times, these ideas are the ones for you,

14. Goal-Setting Board

It doesn’t have to be words. A goal-setting board of just images can be equally powerful. You could theme this board ‘New Year’ if you would like your team to start off the new year with an extra boost of motivation, or if you are a teacher you might want to use this at the beginning of the school year.

15. Words of Wisdom

Fun and easy to put together, this board features inspiring quotes from different people. From Marie Curie’s quote, “Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it,” to Bill Gates’s “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure,” there are so many great unique inspirational quotes.

To make this board, set a plain background, and use acrylic paint or cut-out felt letters to make the letters of the quotes. You can use the space around the quote themed around the person credited.

16. STEM Spotlight

This board features science, technology, engineering, and math topics and showcases people working in those fields. If you are a team working in this area, this board will look particularly great in your office. Divide your board into three sections; innovations on the horizon, famous people in STEM, and ideas for how your team can get involved.

Look into the idea of citizen science—this is the practice of public participation of large-scale studies that everyone can contribute to. There are plenty of free ways online that your team can contribute to real scientific studies, and showcasing these opportunities could be valuable.

17. Fitness Challenge

For this board, you will need to collect lots of different fitness challenges and set a different one, either daily or weekly. The main design of the board doesn’t have to be particularly colorful. Just make sure that the information is clearly displayed and engaging enough that your team is interested. Some ideas of fitness challenges could be:

• Who can hold the longest plank
• First team member to run 5K over their lunch breaks
• Most number of crunches
• Beginners couch to 5K (for the non-runners)
• Most number of pushups
• 7-day 10-minute yoga challenge (you could even host the yoga sessions in your office)
• Start a new sport challenge

Learning and Growth

After you have inspired your team, you want to get in some ways that they can contribute to their own lifelong learning and growth. These next bulletin board ideas will do just that.

18. Podcast Club

A modern twist on a book club, the podcast club bulletin board encourages everyone to share their favorite podcasts. From fiction to non-fiction, politics to comedy, spooky to informative, there are now about 150 million^{3https://explodingtopics.com/blog/number-of-podcasts} podcast episodes out there.

The background of this board doesn’t need to be complicated—just a plain background, a title, and sticky notes or pieces of paper so everyone can write down a podcast recommendation.

19. Infographics

This board idea is brilliant if executed properly. The trick here is to make sure the infographics are printed to a high quality and that all of them are interesting, engaging, and colorful. Have a look at Creative Bloq’s list of interesting infographics to get started.

20. Movie / Book of the Month

You want this board section to feature different movie recommendations or book recommendations each month. There are a few ways you can organize this—either get people to email you nominations on the last day of every month, use the Ballot Board to get people voting, or just use your own recommendations.

Whichever you think is best, you want the board to be striking, with themed images surrounding each teammate’s favorite book or movie.

21 Trivia Time

Divide the teams in your office or classes in your school. This board encourages some healthy competition and encourages everyone to learn new things. Encourage everyone to submit their own questions to keep the board going strong, and award prizes to those who answer correctly. You can use the same layout as you did for the Words of Wisdom board.

22. Word of the Day / Word of the Week

Everyone could benefit from growing their vocabulary—in fact, research suggests^{4https://www.economist.com/johnson/2013/05/29/lexical-facts} that some of us have only learned an additional 10,000 words since we were 8 years old. The idea of this board is simple.

Choose a word for each day of the week (or a word for each week of the month) and display it with its definition. This is a quick and easy bulletin board idea and just involves a bit of printing. There are lots of interesting words you could start off with listed here.

Indubitably, the options presented herein will delight your colleagues in mirthful camaraderie and conviviality.

23. World Language Bulletin Board

Hola, bonjour, nǐ hǎo, hujambo, marhaba—do you have a diverse team who all speak different languages? Then this is the bulletin board idea for you. Use this board as an opportunity to showcase your team’s language skills. The background of your bulletin board can be a phrase translated into as many different languages as you can (try the Rosetta Stone’s list of ways to say ‘good morning’).

Once you have made the background, you can add more information to the forefront. Perhaps you would like to add some facts about different languages (did you know that Iceland has a committee dedicated to approving or denying new Icelandic words?)

You could leave a stack of sticky notes next to the bulletin board and encourage team members to add a motivational quote or greeting in their Mother Language. You could tie this board in with International Mother Language Day on February 21st.

If you need some inspiration, take note of this board from Nisky World Language & ENL. The bold colors on a black background make sure the information stands out effectively and is engaging without being overwhelming.

Source: Nisky World Language & ENL

Funny and Unique

If your office needs a break from the deeper topics, try out some of our funny and unique bulletin board ideas. These ideas are more light-hearted and are designed to give your team a morale boost.

24. Throwback Thursday

A popular social media hashtag, throwback Thursday would work as a modern bulletin board idea. This board features old photos and memorabilia from the past few decades. You can ask your team to bring in some of the items they have collected.

This can be a particularly fun board if your company is an older company with teammates who have worked there for a long time. Maybe some of your team can find a photo from their first day at work 20 years ago.

25. Friday Funnies

For no other reason than it is really good for you to laugh, this Friday Funnies board is just to give the office a little boost before the weekend.

Ask everyone to bring in something everyone else will find funny—a comic strip cut out from a newspaper, their favorite joke written on a sticky note, or a funny story they can pin to the board.

Keep everything else simple when designing this board so everyone can focus on the content.

26. Old School Tech

Floppy disks, cassette tapes, Gameboys—our first experience of technology seems a lifetime ago. In this bulletin board, you take a trip down memory lane. Decorate the board with images and provide trivia and fun facts.

This is extra fun if you have Gen Z teammates—try explaining to your younger colleagues about the times you would hear a parent shout out, “Please get off the internet, I need to use the phone.”

(If you’re looking for an excuse to create this board, National Technology Day is on January 6th).

27. Guess the Baby

If you’ve done a lot of educational or informative bulletin boards, why not break it up with something just fun? For this bulletin board, you will need to ask everyone for a photo of themselves as a baby.

After printing a copy of each of them, print everyone’s names. Then display all of the photos on the board, and pin the names in a pile in the corner. Let your team spend a couple of days figuring out who is who (without anyone giving away which photo is their one).

This one is more fun if you can convince CEOs and senior leadership to dig out some more embarrassing photos!

We really love this example from SASH libraries—especially the frames around each photo which make it unique.

Source: SASH Library

28. Wall of Memes

Positive and Impactful Bulletin Board Ideas

29. Global Citizen Bulletin Board

You can choose to use this bulletin board to celebrate International Volunteer Day or ‘just because.’ Either way, it should have the same strong message—our team is part of a global community, and we work to make the world a better place.

This board can be divided up into three sections: local volunteering opportunities, showcasing people in our team who already volunteer, and photographs/inspiration of larger volunteer efforts.

You could also arrange for your team to take an afternoon off work and head out to volunteer together. Soup kitchens, animal shelters, and hospices are always looking for volunteers.

30. Positive News Articles

An easy board with a cheerful message, this bulletin board is all about spreading the good news. Check out Positive News and BBC’s Uplifting Stories to get started, and save some of your favorite stories. Print them out on good quality paper or thin card and display them on your board. That’s all you need to do to make a big difference to the spirit and morale of your team.

31. Random Acts of Kindness

For this idea, you just need a big stack of sticky notes. If you would like the board to look aesthetic, you could choose to get pastel-colored or rainbow-colored notes. On the underside of each sticky note, write a random act of kindness. For example:

• Buy your next-door neighbor some flowers
• Check in on a friend who is struggling
• Offer to run an errand for a colleague
• Cook dinner for your household tonight

Encourage your team to all take one or more of the notes and carry out their random act of kindness before passing their card along to the next person.

Source: Euroamerican School of Monterry

32. Trade Swap

We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. Maybe you are fantastic at DIY but awful at art, or maybe baking bread is your biggest passion but you have never mastered the art of making sweet treats. This board is simple and easy to make.

Either make a simple background or just leave your board blank (apart from a title and some instructions). Ask teammates to leave sticky notes with one side asking for something they need and the other side describing what they can offer in return. For example, ‘I need help to mow my lawn, and I can trade for some plumbing work’.

This fun bit of team bonding is practically helpful and will foster a sense of community within the workplace.

33. Recognition Board

Show your teammates how much you appreciate them and their contributions by creating a recognition board. This board can be decorated with success and thanks-themed decorations (think gold stars, red hearts, etc.) and use this board to acknowledge colleagues’ milestones, achievements, and exceptional performances. You can include photographs and congratulatory messages to add to the display.

Seasonal and Holiday-Themed Board Ideas

Finally, if you are looking for seasonal and holiday-themed bulletin board ideas, these ideas will keep your classroom or office looking festive.

34. Spring Cleaning

Sometimes, a fresh start is all you need to feel motivated and ready to face the week. Our spring cleaning bulletin board idea features tips and tricks for cleaning and decluttering your home and workspace.

Outline your board with decorative images of cleaning brooms, brushes, and clothes. You could display the title of this board within a mind map bubble and encourage everyone to add their own ideas onto the ‘legs’ of the mind map.

35. April Showers Bring May Flowers

This board will be fun to make in a classroom, particularly with big colorful umbrellas, puddles, and rain boots.

You could also use quotes about the joys of springtime to decorate the board, with teammates having space in one section to share their favorite springtime activities.

36. Beach Vibes

When summer starts heading your way, it is time to bring out your most creative beach ideas to display on this board. Make a yellow sand beach and dazzling blue water with construction card, and decorate with different beach items.

If you want to add some authenticity to your beach, you could make some paper mache starfish or even add some real shells around the border to really bring out the beach vibes.

37. Stay Cool

Either as a stand-alone idea or part of a wider ‘beach vibes’ bulletin board, our staying cool bulletin board idea is aimed to help your teammates cope with the rising heat—especially if you live somewhere it gets really hot.

Remember to include pets in this one, too—it’s often our pets who struggle most in the heat and can often benefit from an ice pack to lay on or an ice cube to lick.

38. Autumn Harvest

39. Spooky Season

It’s time to get out your best Halloween decorations for spooky seasons. Cut-out ghost paperchains and jack-o-lanterns are easy, and a simple black-and-white or black-and-orange background will be suitably spooky.

You could run a few different sections, including one for teammates to share photos of themselves in Halloween costumes and another to share spooky ghost stories.

40. Cozy Winter Wonderland

For a winter bulletin board idea, why not create a cozy wonderland of fluffy snow and cozy little houses? If you want to keep it super easy, stick with cut-out 2D images. But if you are more creative and want a bit more of a challenge, you could use cardboard to make 3D houses.

Use rolls of cotton wool to create a blanket of snow over the roofs of your houses. You could even add a little ice skating ring with scrunched-up saran wrap for the ice.

Pro Tip: Consider adding battery-operated fairy lights to your display to make it really cozy, like this idea below:

Source: A View from a Different Angle

41. Holiday Cheer

The last bulletin board we will leave you with is a holiday cheer theme. Whether you and your team celebrate Christmas or Hanukah or Shōgatsu or Kwanzaa or the winter solstice, put together a board including everyone.

Decorate the board with different images and facts about your teams’ festive traditions. This board will get better and better the more your team adds contributions, so make sure everyone feels welcome to be included.

Bulletin Board Takeaways

To summarize how to make a bulletin board your team will love;

1. Make sure you plan your bulletin board and have clear aims, so you and your team can make the most of your board.
2. Bulletin boards are as diverse as their creator. Whether you are using them in your office as a way to share information or in the classroom to display work, done properly, bulletin boards are fun, engaging, and brighten up the space.
3. Keep your bulletin board clear of unnecessary clutter, and make sure everything is easy to read.

Need more ideas on how to brighten up your office? Check out our article .