For our internal PixelMill team meetings, we try to be on-camera as much as our bandwidths allow. We were remote even before the pandemic hit, and getting that extra feedback of facial expressions and upper-body language helps us to keep our communication clear and our team in-sync. Most of us use Microsoft Teams’ background blur and images to hide the dirty dishes or toddler messes behind us, and some of us will surprise the rest of the team with a customized background for laughs (looking at you, Kunaal, with your lawyer-cat background!).

As an early holiday gift for our team, I made some custom backgrounds to bring some wintery cheer to our meetings – and we want to share these with you! Download the background images below, and follow the steps to add them to your own background. And in super exciting news, Microsoft is pushing the ability to use backgrounds when you use Teams in a web browser as well – it should hit General Availability by mid-December!

How to use a custom background

To add your own background, click the Background filters button when you’re starting to join a meeting (or if you’re on a meeting already, click the three dots and choose Background filters). Click the “Add new” button at the top and browse to your background file, and select it. If you’re already in a meeting, you may need to reopen your Background filters panel to choose the new image and click the buttons for previewing or applying it. The background will appear reversed in your window, but don’t worry, it will show up the correct way for everyone else!

How to make your own custom background

Feeling creative and want to make your own custom background? Fire up your favorite graphics program and set the canvas to be a 16:9 ratio, with a minimum size of 1920 x 1080 at 72 dpi. Save your image as a jpeg or png and follow the same steps above to add the background to Teams.

Our gift to you

Download our custom holiday background pack, complete with festive lawyer cat – with no strings attached (although you’re always welcome to sign up for our newsletter to be the first to get new goodies like this!).