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Mak­ing seam­less pat­terns in Illustrator

Mak­ing a pat­tern in Illus­tra­tor can be as sim­ple as drag­ging any object or objects to the Swatch panel and you have got a pat­tern so to speak. But that is not what is called a seam­less pat­tern where the pat­tern repeats itself in all directions.

To make a seam­less pat­tern in Illus­tra­tor one needs to make the base pat­tern with in a square of any size. It’s con­ve­nient to start from the cor­ners. An object placed on a cor­ner has to be in every cor­ner so that one-fourth of the object is inside the square. Objects on the side edges have to have a copy placed on the oppo­site edge. Objects that don’t touch the edges can be posi­tioned any­where. If you have an object on the

This may sound a bit com­pli­cated when you read this but this dia­gram explains this visu­ally. On the right side the final pat­tern is shown.

To define this sim­ple pat­tern as an Illus­tra­tor pat­tern we have to have a square at the same size as the guide­lines. This square has to be behind the pat­tern and it must NOT have any fill or stroke applied. It’s of the same size as the guide­lines shown. It will make the bound­aries of the seam­less pat­tern. When this is ready, drag the whole thing into the Swatch panel and you got your pat­tern. Illus­tra­tor only uses what is inside this col­or­less square.

Instead of drag­ging into the Swatch panel you can go to Edit > Define Pat­tern… and it will add the pat­tern as a new swatch.

This pat­tern we just cre­ated is these gray crosses with trans­par­ent back­ground and any back­ground will show through. If we want a spe­cific color fill we have to have an addi­tional color square inside the pat­tern in the first place. This color square has to be below the crosses but above the col­or­less def­i­n­i­tion square. Make it a lit­tle bit big­ger than the invis­i­ble square like this:

Note that the fine white lines you may see in the pat­tern will not print. If you find it is irri­tat­ing, you can get rid of them by turn­ing off the Anti-Alias in the Illus­tra­tor Pref­er­ence.

Now we got a very basic pat­tern done fairly eas­ily and you should know by now what makes this tick. But there are a few things I would like to add to this process which will in the long run make it eas­ier to do more com­plex work.

Move with precision.

To start with, make the square of a cer­tain and even mea­sure­ment. In this case I used a square of 60 by 60 mil­lime­ters. You can use any size you like. But what you gain by this is that when you place the first cross you can send a copy using the Move com­mand and using the exact measurement.

You can access Move dia­log box in at least three ways. While the object is selected, dou­ble click either the Selec­tion tool or the Direct Selec­tion tool (the black or the white arrows).

Shift + Cmd + M on the mac (Shift + Ctrl + M on a pc) will also present you with the dia­log box.

Object > Trans­form > Move… is the third method.

Global Col­ors.

Use Global col­ors when you are mak­ing a pat­tern. This will give you a far greater con­trol over your pat­terns because you can adjust the pat­tern col­ors after you have made it with­out hav­ing to rede­fine the pattern.

First select or define the col­ors you want you use in your pat­tern and drag them into the Swatch panel. Then make them Global by dou­ble click­ing each color and check the Global check­mark in the dia­log box that opens.

You can also start by mak­ing a few boxes to match your col­ors and when you are sat­is­fied you can make a Color Group by click­ing the Color Group icon at the bot­tom of the Swatch panel. In the dia­log box that opens be sure that Con­vert Process to Global is checked.

Use Trans­form Effect.

Send­ing the objects of the pat­tern to a pre­cise posi­tion using the Move com­mand is great. If you are mak­ing pat­terns on a reg­u­lar basis you would def­i­nitely ben­e­fit from using the Trans­form Effect. That way you only have to use one object as a basis and the effect will make copies in all direc­tions you need. Let’s try this out.

Put one object over the upper left cor­ner. In this case you don’t have to put the cen­ter of the object on pre­cisely over the cor­ner. We need to put the effect on the object three times, one for each copy direc­tion. It sounds like more work and it is for the first time, but I will show you that this is worth it because we will get greater con­trol and this is reusable for fur­ther pat­tern making.

So, with the cross or your own object selected we go to Effect > Dis­tort & Trans­form > Trans­form.

You may notice that I have put a key­board short­cut for this because I use this effect a lot.

Put Pre­view on and for the first effect fill in like this:

1 Copy

Hor­i­zon­tal: 60 mm

Ver­ti­cal: 0 mm

Have the Appear­ance panel open. It’s the gate­way to all effects and if you need to edit the effect you do it through the Appear­ance panel.

Select the object again and apply a sec­ond Trans­form effect. Illus­tra­tor will give you a warn­ing, telling you that you are apply­ing the same effect again. Ignore this and keep on going. The warn­ing is how­ever use­ful and you should not turn it off. Some effects, like the 3D effect can be really CPU inten­sive if used more than once on the sam object and it is only good to get the warning.

For this sec­ond effect use the setting:

Hor­i­zon­tal: 0 mm

Ver­ti­cal: 60 mm

This will put a copy in the lower left cor­ner and also copy the upper right object down to the lower right corner.

For the third effect, the cen­ter object we use:

Hor­i­zon­tal: 30 mm

Ver­ti­cal: 30 mm

This puts a copy of the object in the cen­ter but will also copy every­thing else too out­side of the square area. But that is just fine although it’s not doing any­thing with our design.

Define the pat­tern by drag­ging to the Swatch panel or Edit > Define Pat­tern… (ignore the big cross over­lap­ping the pattern)

This setup allows you to edit just the object in the upper left cor­ner and every­thing you do with it will be reflected to the other objects instantly. Try to scale the object, rotate it or what ever and make a new ver­sion of the pat­tern. Try also to change the num­ber of copies just to get the hang of this method. Then apply the pat­tern to some box or cir­cle and edit the col­ors that are already defined by dou­ble click­ing them in the Swatch panel. Pow­er­ful? Yes, it is. But wait, there is more.

Graphic style.

To make all our effort reusable for later pat­terns we can save the set­ting as a Graphic Style. First select the object in the upper left cor­ner and drag the Appear­ance icon of the object to the Graphic Style panel.

Now, plac­ing any object over a 60 by 60 mm square and apply­ing the Graphic style it will add the same effect to that object. You will how­ever have to edit the color. Use the Fill sec­tor in the Appear­ance panel to do that. That is the obvi­ous place to do this editing.

Scale and rotate.

Hav­ing made a pat­terns or series of pat­terns it’s now time check out a few ways to edit a pat­tern after it has been made.

I already men­tioned that by using Global Col­ors you can change the col­ors inside the pat­tern This can save you a great amount of time.

We made the pat­tern in one size and that size may have noth­ing to do with the size you need to use in your art­work. There are few ways that a pat­terns works. To start with, a pat­tern is like an end­less wall­pa­per inside the object you apply it to. There are a few ways Illus­tra­tor treats the pat­tern and there are set­tings you can use to change it.

To start with there is a set­ting in Illus­tra­tor Pref­er­ences > Gen­eral that says: Trans­form Pat­tern Tiles. With it turned on any changes you make to an object using the Bound­ing Box will affect the pat­tern too. Scal­ing will dis­tort the pat­tern and if you move the object the whole pat­tern move with it too. How­ever, if you have this set­ting turned off, the pat­tern will stay in it’s place like a wall­pa­per while the object is moved or scaled.

If you want to scale or rotate the pat­tern or even move it slightly within the object the best tools are the Scale tool, the Rotate tool and the Move com­mand. You can actu­ally use any­thing in the Object > Trans­form menu.

Using the Scale and Rotate tools (and the other related trans­form tools) requires you to hold down the Alt/Option key and click to get the dia­log box. At the bot­tom of these dia­log box you can uncheck the Objects check box but check the Pat­terns check box and that way only trans­form the pat­tern. Remem­ber that you can put your cur­sor in the per­cent­age or degree fields and use the up and down arrows to mod­ify the num­bers and that the Shift key will mul­ti­ply the num­ber movement.

Yet another trick, that will most likely knock your socks off, is that you can directly trans­form the pat­tern only, within an object, bypass­ing the dia­log boxes, by select­ing the object, select­ing the Scale tool as an exam­ple (hit the S key) and then hold down the Tilde key. Now drag with the mouse to trans­form. This is a blast­ing per­for­mance first time you see.

Rede­fine a pattern.

One way to learn about how fancy pat­terns are made is to see how oth­ers have made them. Illus­tra­tor has a great selec­tion of pat­terns which you can open by going to the Swatch pan­els fly out menu down to the Open Swatch Library… and go to Patterns.

If you want to learn more about a pat­tern you can drag its icon to your art­board and check out how it’s built. The invis­i­ble square comes with it and you will see that many of the pat­terns extend the square. Tak­ing a pat­tern like that to the art­board also gives you the oppor­tu­nity to make changes to it and make a ver­sion of the orig­i­nal. Not only that, but you can Alt/Option-drag the changed pat­tern over the orig­i­nal one and by doing so, rede­fine the orig­i­nal one. Every­thing in your art­work that had already been col­ored with the pat­tern will instantly get the updated pat­tern applied to it.