Setting a page background colour in Publish by Zaweba

White is not the only colour paper can be. A deep blue poster, a cream certificate, a pale green menu or a dark party invitation with bright text all start with a coloured page. In Publish by Zaweba that is a single setting rather than a rectangle you have to stretch to the edges and keep at the back.

Page > Background colour, or the Properties panel, sets a colour for a page or for a whole master. The background is printed into the bleed, so it reaches all the way to the trimmed edge.

One page or many

Set the background on a single page when that page is different, such as a coloured cover on a newsletter with white inside pages, or a dark back page for contact details.

Set it on a master when many pages should share it. Every page that uses that master takes the colour, and changing the master changes them all. In a brochure, you might have one master with a pale tint for feature pages and another with plain white for the rest.

Why bleed matters here

A coloured page is the classic case for bleed. When a print shop trims a stack of sheets, the cut is never perfectly exact. If the colour stopped exactly at the edge of the page, a slightly off cut would leave a thin white line along one side. Printing the background out into the bleed means there is colour to spare, and the trimmed edge stays coloured.

Because the page background is printed into the bleed automatically, you do not need to draw an oversized rectangle to get the same effect. That also means nothing to accidentally select and drag when you are working on the page.

For home printing, remember that most printers leave a white margin round the paper regardless. A full colour background will have a border unless it is trimmed afterwards. That can be fine for a notice, but for a postcard or a card you want edge to edge, a print shop is the better route.

Choosing colours that work

A background sets the tone of the whole page, and text has to be readable on top of it. Dark backgrounds need light text, and light backgrounds need dark text; mid tones are harder to read in either. Printed colours often come out a little darker than on screen, so a background that looks just right on the monitor may need to be a shade lighter.

Using a document colour for the background ties it to the rest of the design, and it changes along with the palette or a colour scheme. That makes it easy to try a page in a few backgrounds and keep the text and panels in step.

Think about ink too. A full colour background uses a lot of it. For a flyer printed in hundreds at home, a white page with a coloured band may be cheaper and quicker. For a print shop job, a full background is simply part of the design.

Backgrounds and the other layers

The page background sits behind everything else. Pictures, shapes, panels and text all sit above it. A picture with a washout recolour on top of a coloured background gives a soft, tinted effect; a semi transparent panel over the background gives a slightly lighter or darker area for text. Those combinations give depth without extra colours.

Master pages carry headers, footers and page numbers as well as backgrounds, so a master can define the whole frame of a page in one place, with the content of each page sitting over it.

Set the background early, before choosing text colours, and the rest of the design in Publish by Zaweba will fall into place around it.