preface
My role: Visual Designer / Art Director
Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Midjourney AI, Adobe Illustrator
Chronicle is an AI powered presentation tool that creates stunning industry standard presentations. Chronicle was founded by Tejas and Mayuresh, and launched to the world in 2025. Since it's inception, the product has evolved through different MVPs as a response to user behaviour, patterns, intention and unique use cases. The latest product version is the most refined version of what the team had envisioned.
My role at Chronicle was to own the visual and brand designs as part of product as well as marketing efforts. Of which, the product deck backgrounds is the second largest project I produced end-to-end at Chronicle, starting from discovery, stress testing, to creating the required assets to be used for the product. In conclusion I finalised over 200 deck backgrounds, categorised according to a variety of use cases for individuals as well as B2B users.
discovery
The goal was to build a repository or gallery of decks that users could pick from as a starting template, the way a design tool might offer starter layouts. To do that properly, I had to actually build sample decks across different real world case studies rather than design backgrounds in isolation. That process surfaced the real problem faster than any audit spreadsheet could have: the existing background library simply wasn't deep or varied enough to cover the range of needs across different users and groups.
From there I ran a full audit of the existing library, going through every background one by one and deciding what stayed, what got reworked, and what was retired from the platform permanently. This audit became the backbone of the rest of the project, since it defined both the gap I was designing for and the baseline quality bar the new backgrounds had to clear.
Use Cases and ICP
With the gap identified, the next question was who I was actually designing for. Which turned out to be B2B users working in growth, marketing and design: people who regularly have to present to stakeholders to discuss a project, not just look at a deck alone on their own screen. That single distinction, presenting to a room versus presenting to yourself, shaped almost every decision that followed.
It also meant the backgrounds couldn't be scoped to full deck slides alone. They had to work as backgrounds for smaller in-product surfaces too, like metric cards and widgets, since those are often what a viewer's eye lands on first in a live presentation.
As B2B licenses started outpacing individual sign ups, the design language had to shift to account for corporate taste specifically, rather than staying broad enough for everyone. Concretely, that meant:
Simpler gradients over busier, more decorative ones
Calming, restrained colour tones rather than saturated or attention seeking ones
Imagery that felt impactful without being visually busy
Deliberate empty space kept around the centre, left and right of each background, so widgets and text always had clean room to sit without competing for attention
That last point became one of the more important, less obvious constraints of the whole project: a background's job is to hold space, not fill it.
Referencing
I planned for few directions inspired from previous set of backgrounds, but there had to be a common ground where the categories were to be created for both B2B as well as single license users. Initially we planned for 3D, abstracted, fine art, creative, geometric architecture, gradients, grainy, motion, lights, nature, people, landscape photography, real architecture, sports, textures and caustics.
Design Decisions
Compositions
With a background in photography, I chose to follow the classic composition principles, the rule of thirds, vanishing points, etc to guide how each background was built. This is not just aesthetic decision, but they're a system: they give every background a predictable place for the eye to rest and a predictable place left open for whatever content sits over.
Colour
It spanned a wide variety of unintentional palettes, but one rule stayed constant across, that is: avoid mid tone colours, since they don't hold up reliably against either white or black text (most used colors for text statistically). This learning was shared by the design lead, and it became a hard constraint as I checked every palette against texts before it was selected to be used.
Production
Crating these assets drew from a deliberately mixed pipeline rather than a single tool/source, since no single method could cover the range of moods and use cases the library needed:
Figma, used to build gradients
Midjourney, used for conceptual photographs
Unsplash+, used for people, abstract as well as some texture photography
Real life photography, captured by our own team members as well
stress testing
I built a Figma plugin using Claude code to check AA contrast compliance of our primary text colours against the averaged colour of each background under test, so no background could enter the library on taste alone, it had to pass a measurable accessibility bar first.
closing notes
By the time I left Chronicle, the revamped library stood at over 200 backgrounds, backed by a repeatable system rather than a one off asset drop: a documented audit process, a Figma plugin for contrast testing, and a sourcing pipeline spanning Figma gradients, Midjourney, Unsplash and original team photography. The intent was for this to outlast the next updates and launches, giving future designers a framework to extend the library rather than starting from scratch each time.
credits
Engineering: Praveen
Photographs: Claire Taylor, Pavan Tirumani