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,...