Use different shades (hue) and saturation (chroma) to add variation. Limit your color palette to two or three colors. Limiting your choices will produce the best results. This illustration is just that, an illustration–not a recommendation for these particular colors.

I’m not suggesting that you take a crayon-box attitude to your documents though. The more contrast, the more depth, which improves readability.

It also adds to the layers of separation, as shown in the illustration in Figure B. In that regard, contrast is usually the most important factor: the higher the contrast, the more legible the text. Your main consideration should be legibility. Color-wise, there are several attributes, hue, chroma, and so on. There’s a lot to consider when introducing color into a document. Choose No Color to remove a colored background.Īlthough simple, you could create some ghastly backgrounds. You can click More Colors to fine-tune a gallery color. Choose a color from the gallery (palette) as shown in Figure A.Click Page Color in the Page Background group.To add color to a document’s background, you’ll work from the Design tab, as follows. You might decide to add a sedate color to a promotional letter or resume. LEARN MORE: Office 365 Consumer pricing and features Add colorĪdding a bit of color is probably the easiest way to liven up an otherwise boring document. (In earlier versions, look for the Page Layout tab.) The browser edition doesn’t support the background feature. You’ll find these options on the Design tab in the Page Background group. I’m using Office 365 Word (desktop) on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use older versions. I’ll share only the mechanical process how you implement the feature is up to you. Keep in mind that adding a background color or picture to a document is much easier than designing a visually effective document. Both are easy to accomplish, technically speaking, and in this article, I’ll show you how to do both. For instance, you might want to change the background’s color or even use a picture as the document’s background. However, when a document requires more, Word offers many visual possibilities. That’s the way it should be though because most documents don’t require special graphics and colors. Most documents are rather boring–the same black text on a white background. This article was first published in December 2011 and was updated in March 2019. In the following tutorial, Susan Harkins explains the process when using Word 2010. Editor’s note: In the video, Brandon Vigliarolo uses Microsoft Office 365 and walks through the steps of adding colors or images to the background of your Word documents.

Word to design word background document