Introducing Scrims

PowerBI.tips is excited to announce our new tool to help you build the best looking reports, Scrims.

We’ve built out a fast and easy solution for snapping visualizations into place while giving your reports the extra special look and feel that allows your audiences to be impressed without losing focus on the important stuff. We developed Scrims to give you this shortcut to amazing looking reports

What are Scrims?

A Scrim is a background image that you would use on your Power BI Report pages. Why the name Scrim? The term scrim is used in theater productions. It is a backdrop that is placed on the stage behind the actors. It adds context & engages the audience with the production. We thought this idea crosses over well with Power BI.

A scrim can change the mood of a theater just like a well designed background image in your report. Scrims were developed to be easily adaptable to different color themes and in each set of offerings we release we’ll be providing you with as many color options as possible.

Why Do I need One?

Scrims solve several problems.

1. The most important problem it solves is time. As BI practitioners ourselves we know the demands that are placed on you. More often then not the visual look and feel gets the least amount of attention due to deadlines. We want all the time you invest in the data and building visuals to impress your audiences by being presented in a beautiful way.
2. Scrims are designed the same way we developed Layouts. By emphasizing proper design focused on the Gestalt design principles to ensure the end users experience enjoyable and non-distracting reports.
3. Using a Scrim you will reduce the number of objects on the page. Less elements means faster rendering reports. Here is a blog that tests this by adding more visuals to a page “More Visuals Mo Problems”. Scrims add the illusion of a very large number of objects without a negative impact.

Scrims come in a Bundle

A Scrim bundle contains a series of images that you can use in any way you want in your Power BI file. Each Scrim will have different page sizes to best suit your report needs. Every Scrim will contain a default 16 x 9 (1280 x 720) aspect ratio. Most Scrim bundles will have additional ratios such as 8 x 9 (1280 x 1440) or 4:3 (960 x 720). You will see the sizes prominently displayed for each bundle with the red tags.

Each bundle contains 6 pages minimum for each size, which means on average you will receive at least 12 pages in each bundle. Each Scrim bundle also includes the color theme that corresponds with it in JSON format to easily upload into your Power BI Report.