What Street Muralists Can Teach UI Designers About Scale and Perspective

A mural and a mobile interface seem to have almost nothing in common. One is painted across the side of a building and seen by thousands of strangers, and the other lives on a screen a few inches wide. But both face the same problem: they have to communicate with a viewer whose distance, angle, and attention the designer can’t control.

Street artists have been solving that problem in public for a long time, without analytics dashboards or A/B tests. The feedback is immediate, since a mural that doesn’t work gets walked past. That makes muralists a useful source of ideas for anyone designing interfaces. Here are four lessons worth borrowing.

1. Design for The Approach, Not Just The Arrival

Nobody sees a large mural all at once. A viewer spots it from down the street, then notices figures and shapes as they get closer, and finally sees brushwork, texture, and small details when standing beside it. Strong murals work at every stage. From far away they read as a bold silhouette and a few dominant colors. At mid-range the composition and subject become clear. Up close, the craft rewards attention.

Interfaces have the same three stages, even if we rarely name them. There’s the glance (what is this, and is it for me?), the scan (where do I go?), and the read (what exactly does this say?). Many screens are designed only for the third stage, with every element carrying equal weight and detail. That works if the user has already committed, but not for the first two seconds, when they decide whether to stay.

A quick way to test this is the squint test. Blur your eyes, or apply a heavy Gaussian blur to a screenshot, and see what survives. If you can still tell where the primary action is and roughly how the page is organized, your design works at a distance. If everything dissolves into gray, the hierarchy depends on details that won’t register at a glance.

2. Perspective is a Promise, So Keep It

Few artists play with viewer expectations as cleverly as Danila Shmelev, who works as Shozy. His trompe l’oeil murals turn flat apartment walls into what look like extensions of the building, with staircases, openings, and structures that seem to project into real space. The effect uses perspective, shading, and architectural mimicry to fool the brain, at least for a second glance.

The lesson is that the illusion holds only if every element keeps the same promise. A believable mural needs one implied light source, a consistent vanishing point, and shadows that fall where they should. A single shadow pointing the wrong way breaks the spell, and the viewer sees paint on a wall again.

Depth in interface design works the same way. When you use shadows, layers, and elevation, you tell the user something about the structure of the screen: this card sits above that surface, this button is raised and can be pressed, or this modal is temporary. If your shadows come from different directions, or if elevation is applied decoratively instead of meaningfully, users lose the ability to read the interface intuitively. Choose a light source and a small set of elevation levels, then apply them consistently. Every pixel of depth should mean something.

Shozy’s work also suggests a point about restraint. The best trompe l’oeil delights briefly and then lets the viewer in on the joke. Interface effects should work the same way. A subtle depth cue that helps someone understand a screen is useful, while a heavy skeuomorphic flourish that demands attention on every interaction gets tiresome fast.

3. Treat Context As Part Of The Material

Muralists never start with a blank canvas. They start with a wall, and the wall has windows, doors, pipes, weathering, and a specific light at specific hours. Good murals work with those features instead of ignoring them. A window becomes an eye, and a crack becomes part of the composition.

The Australian artist Rone takes this idea further. His immersive installation TIME • RONE, shown in the Centenary Galleries of the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, invites visitors into a space of peeling paint and cracked ceilings, and it works as a multi-sensory experience where the surroundings are part of the art. The setting isn’t a backdrop for the work, because the setting is the work.

UI designers often forget that their surroundings matter just as much. An interface is rarely used in ideal conditions. It’s used one-handed on a train, in bright sunlight, in a dark bedroom at midnight, or while someone is half-listening to a conversation. Each of those conditions changes what good design looks like:

• Thumb reach determines where primary actions can sit comfortably, the way a wall’s shape determines where a figure can stand.
• Ambient light affects contrast requirements, which is why dark mode and sufficient contrast ratios are practical needs and not just stylistic choices.
• Interruption shapes how much state an interface should preserve, since real users get pulled away constantly.

Before you design a screen, describe where and how it will actually be used, in as much physical detail as a muralist would survey a wall. Then design for that place.

4. Simplify For Distance

Murals are big, but their images are rarely complicated. A muralist knows that fine detail disappears at scale, so they rely on large shapes, strong value contrast, and a clear focal point. Everything else supports it, and the empty areas of a wall do as much work as the painted ones.

The interface equivalent is deciding what the most important thing on a screen is and letting everything else serve it. That means one primary action per view, a type scale with clear steps between sizes, and generous whitespace that acts like the negative space on a wall. When every element competes for attention, none of them wins, and the user’s eye has nowhere to land.

A useful habit is to ask whether every element on a screen would still be visible if the screen were ten times farther away. If the answer is no, it’s a detail. Details are fine, but they should be the reward for looking closely and never the only way to understand the screen.

Try It Yourself: A 15-minute Mural Review

You can apply all of this to a current project in a single short session:

1. Step back. Print your screen or view it at a quarter of its size. Note what you can still identify from a distance.
2. Blur it. Run the squint test and check that the primary action and main sections survive.
3. Audit the light. Check that shadows, elevation, and layering follow one consistent logic across the whole design.
4. Survey the wall. Write down the real-world conditions your users will be in, then test the design against at least one difficult one, such as bright sunlight or one-handed use.

Conclusion: The Wall and The Screen

Muralists and interface designers are working on the same fundamental problem: making something legible, meaningful, and memorable for people who are passing through on their own terms. The muralist just has to solve it at ten meters tall, in public, with paint that can’t be undone.

The next time you’re stuck on a layout, try walking through a city and looking at the walls. The best ones have already worked out how to hold a stranger’s attention, and much of what they’ve learned transfers to the screen.