Each tab has its own canvas backdrop: a pattern, a canvas colour, a pattern colour, an opacity and a pattern size, all stored per tab. You change them from the Tab Style dialog, a focused modal that gives these controls plenty of room.
Opening the Dialog
Click the Theme & canvas button in the bottom-right corner of the editor, beside the zoom controls (it is there on every screen size, phones included). The Tab Style dialog opens on its home; press Canvas under Fine-tune to open the backdrop controls, and the Tab Style bar across the panel's top to return. You can also run Open Canvas Options from the command palette, which opens the dialog straight on the Canvas panel.
The button is only there for people who can edit the tab, so it does not appear for a Participant or a Viewer on a shared link, in an embed, in zen mode, or in Draw mode.
Every control applies 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 click outside it simply dismisses it. Each change is an ordinary edit, so undo takes it back.
The Canvas Panel
The Canvas panel gathers the backdrop controls:
- Patterns come in two carousels, each tile drawn in the pattern itself (nine to a page on a wider screen, six on a phone). Static holds fourteen: Grid, Blank, Lines, Graph, Crosshatch, Confetti, Stripes, Diagonal, Waves, Bricks, Isometric, Checkerboard, Hexagonal and Engineering. Animated holds five (Flow, Drift, Aurora, Ripple, Ribbons) that bring the canvas to life with soft ambient motion.
- Colours offers a Canvas swatch (the backdrop fill) and a Pattern swatch (the dots, lines or marks drawn on top). Each opens the colour picker: the theme's palette, the house colours (soft and strong for the canvas, strong only for the pattern), the colours already used in the document, and Add a custom colour (four coloured dots) for one of your own. Confetti is multi-coloured, so it ignores the pattern colour.
- Opacity is a slider with a percentage readout that fades the canvas colour and the pattern together.
- Size is a slider (50% to 200%) that scales each pattern tile, so you can make a grid finer or coarser. Blank has nothing to scale.
- 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 theme-matched and reduced-motion safe: if you prefer reduced motion, each one simply freezes on a pleasant still frame.
The Other Panels
The same dialog also hosts the Colours panel, where every theme, your own custom ones included, sits in one list to recolour the whole tab. Picking a theme repaints the backdrop to match, but keeps any canvas colour, pattern or opacity you set yourself, the same way it keeps hand-set element colours. Learn more in Themes. The Text panel sets the tab's default typeface and text size, and the eighteen Looks on the dialog's home set the theme, finish, font and pattern together in one click; see Choosing Fonts.
Background style is per tab, so different tabs in one document can carry different patterns and colours, for instance a clean grid for an overview and a darker backdrop for a detail view. A new tab starts with the pattern, colours and opacity of the tab you added it from.
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