This recipe shows the usefulness of backgrounds in the dashboard. It will show how backgrounds can help provide additional depth to objects and help to group certain areas together for better visualization.
Make sure you have all your objects such as charts and selectors ready on the canvas. The following is an example of the two charts before the makeover. Bind some data to the charts if you want to change the coloring of the series.
- Choose Background4 from the Art and Backgrounds tab of the Components window.
- Stretch the background so that it fills the size of the canvas.
- Make sure that the ordering of the backgrounds is behind the charts. To change the ordering of the background, go to the object browser, select the background object, and then press the - key until the background object is behind the chart.
- Select Background from the Art and Backgrounds tab and put two of them under the charts, as shown in the following screenshot:
- When the backgrounds are in place, open the properties window for the backgrounds and set the background color to your desired color. In this example, we chose dark grey and light grey for each background.
As you can see with the before and after pictures, having backgrounds can make a huge difference in terms of aesthetics. The objects are much more pleasant to look at now and there is certainly a lot of depth in the charts.
The best way to choose the right backgrounds that fit your dashboard is to play around with the different background objects and their colors. If you are not very artistic, you can come up with a bunch of examples and demonstrate them to the business users to see which one they prefer the most.
It is important to use backgrounds carefully and not to use them in the wrong places. A good reference that we recommend is the book Information Dashboard Design: Displaying data for at-a-glance monitoring, Stephen Few, Analytics Press. This is a great book that will guide you on the best dashboard design practices and on when to use backgrounds.