Using an adequate background can improve the aesthetics, quadrature, and style of a dashboard. In this regard, having some designs ready beforehand can save you valuable development time.

Building a background doesn't necessarily require spending hours on specialized tools such as Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign. You can start your background collection by borrowing some of the images used in Qlik's demos and making small adjustments.

Start by downloading a demo from http://us-b.demo.qlik.com/, remove all the objects, and print the screen in order to create a base image:

After this, you can modify bits and pieces, such as the headers, panels, or shadows. For instance, you could Google deep blue wallpaper to get a good-looking texture, crop a rectangle, and paste it over the color stripe of the base image in order to change its look and feel to match your organization's corporate colors (Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo would be jealous of such talent for the visual arts!)

Also, you can isolate the raw materials of the background and save them as separate files to create a library of components that you can mix and match later on. For example, here's a collection of side images that I use for my applications:

As time goes by, you will find yourself expanding your library from design websites, referring to more demos, or even creating your own components when inspiration strikes.