Changing the Canvas Background

Each tab has its own canvas backdrop: a pattern, a canvas colour, a pattern colour, and an opacity, all stored per tab. You change them from the Tab Look & Feel dialog, a focused modal that gives these controls plenty of room.

Opening the dialog

Right-click the empty canvas to open the canvas menu, then choose Change Canvas. The Tab Look & Feel dialog opens on its Canvas tab. (Choosing Change colour scheme from the same menu opens the very same dialog on its Colour scheme tab.) On any screen size, phones included, you can also tap the paintbrush button in the bottom-right corner of the editor, beside the zoom controls, which opens the same dialog. The dialog has a tab strip below its header, so once it is open you can switch between Canvas and Colour scheme freely.

Every control applies live to the active tab as you click, so the canvas updates behind the dialog. There is no Apply or Cancel step: the dialog is an editor, not a wizard, and closing it with the X, Escape, or a backdrop click simply dismisses it.

The Canvas tab

The Canvas tab gathers the backdrop controls:

• Pattern is a grid of background patterns, shown all at once. Fourteen are static: Blank, Grid, Lines, Graph, Crosshatch, Stripes, Diagonal, Isometric, Hexagonal, Engineering, Checkerboard, Bricks, Waves and Confetti. Five are animated (Flow, Drift, Aurora, Ripple, Ribbons) and bring the canvas to life with soft ambient motion.
• Colours offers a Canvas colour swatch (the backdrop fill) and a Pattern colour swatch (the lines or marks drawn on top).
• Opacity is a slider with a percentage readout that fades the pattern in or out.
• Size is a slider (50% to 200%) that scales each pattern tile, so you can make a grid finer or coarser.
• Speed appears only while an animated pattern is selected: a slider from 25% to 300% that sets how briskly the motion runs, from a barely-there drift to a lively stream.

The animated patterns are colour scheme-matched and reduced-motion safe: if you prefer reduced motion, each one simply freezes on a pleasant still frame.

The Colour scheme tab

The same dialog also hosts the Colour scheme tab, where a two-level category browse (Cool, Warm, Dark, Multi-colour, Formal, plus a Default quick-pick) lets you recolour the whole tab. Picking a colour scheme also updates the tab's backdrop to match. Learn more in Colour Schemes.