Seamless Patterns in Illustrator
One thing that’s always been popular is the design of repeating patterns. People love patterns, and always have. It doesn’t matter if those patterns are in a rug, on fabric, or even on wallpaper. Anything that you can design, you can apply a pattern to. In the last few updates to Adobe Illustrator, they have implemented a feature that enables you to build custom patterns easily. You can build seamless repeating patterns that are vector-based. This is incredible, because you can apply the same pattern to small elements, or large elements without having to worry about size and resolution. In this tutorial video, I’m going to show you how to create seamless patterns in Illustrator.
Pattern creation inside of Adobe Illustrator CC is not difficult. When you use the pattern options panel, you can have complete control over how your pattern is built. You can control the size of the repeating element, by lowering or raising the tile size in the pattern options panel. This is useful if you’re creating large patterns, or small patterns. You can make a pattern 10 pixels by 10 pixels, or 500 pixels by 500 pixels. It really just depends on what you’re making the pattern for. If you want to see what you can do with these patterns on the web, see my other video about SVG patterns
When you create a new pattern, it is saved in the swatches panel. Here, you can save your swatches for later, and even organize them by groups. This will enable you to save patterns for later, without having to worry about cluttering up your swatches panel. Another great thing about patterns being applied to swatches, is the fact that it doesn’t matter how large or small your object is. The pattern will simply repeat over and over again vertically and horizontally, in order to fill the object.
Conclusion: Seamless Patterns in Illustrator
Did you have any problems with creating seamless patterns in Illustrator? When you are finished creating patterns, simply click the fly out menu and the swatches panel and select save swatches. You can save them as a native Adobe Illustrator document, or you can save them as a .ase file. If you have any questions about creating seamless patterns in Illustrator, feel free to leave your questions in the comments section below.
