Learn to Diagnose and Fix Repeat Patterns in Adobe Illustrator

1. About this Class: [MUSIC] Welcome. I'm Chris Ruff and I'm a surface designer. That means I've made hundreds of repeat patterns and Adobe Illustrator that I license or sell to manufacturers to use on their products. This is a follow up class to my previous one, which was learn everything about creating repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator. In this one, I'm going to show you how to diagnose and fix any technical problems that you might find in your patterns because things don't always go perfectly smoothly. If you've ever made a repeat pattern and expected it to look like this but instead, it looks like this or maybe you've discovered that there are tiny hairline breaks between your pattern tiles and you're not sure what's causing them. Or maybe you discover that your motifs don't line up perfectly in your patterns. Every designer, eventually comes across some of these problems. I'm going to give you the tools and techniques to diagnose and fix problems like these. Now this is an intermediate level class and I will give a really brief review of how to make a repeat pattern, but you'll get a lot more out of the class if you've already made some patterns and are familiar with the process. It takes a little practice to identify and fix these kinds of errors, so as a project, I'm going to give you an opportunity to practice a little bit. I've created three repeat patterns that all have flaws in them and I've uploaded that Illustrator file to the projects and resources section of the class so you can download it, look at the patterns, figure out what's wrong with them and fix them. That'll be great practice and if you get stuck, there is also an answers sheet to give you some hints about what's wrong with the patterns. I think that's about it. Let's go get started. 2. Pattern Making Review: Here's a really quick review of how you make a repeat pattern. Every pattern starts with a bounding box. This one happens to be five inches by five inches. But it can be any size and it doesn't have to be square. Then we just fill our box with motifs. If there are any motifs that cross the edges of the tile, then we need to copy them or clone them onto the other side of the tile. We choose each of them. We can right-click and go to Transform, Move. Since our bounding box is five inches by five inches, we want to move it horizontally five inches but zero vertically and hit Copy. Then we do the same thing top to bottom. We choose these motifs, right-click, Transform, Move. This time we want zero horizontal and five vertical, and Click Copy. Now we just need to make sure that the bounding box has no stroke or fill, and that it's at the back of the tile. We can right-click again. This time click, Arrange, Send to Back. Now we just select the whole thing and drag it into swatches palette. It shows up right there. We'll create a shape and click on Fill and fill it with our pattern. There it is. It's a really pretty easy process. You can also make patterns with the Illustrator Pattern tool. I'm not going to go into that in this class, but I'm a big fan of it. I think it's a very powerful tool. If you want to learn how to use it, I encourage you to take my previous class, learn everything about creating repeat patterns in Adobe Illustrator. When things don't go perfectly smoothly, like this one did, you may come up with some technical issues. Let's go through those and figure out how to diagnose them. 3. Fixing Bounding Box Issues: The most common problem that you're going to run into with repeat patterns is issues with your bounding box. Let's start there. Here's a floral pattern. This is the repeat tile here, and this is how it's supposed to look. Here's what it looks like with a bounding box error. When you see big gaps like this between your pattern tiles, you probably have a bounding box error. They're really easy to diagnose though. There's three things that you need to check. First, is there a bounding box or did you forget to put one in there? Two, is the bounding box invisible so that it has no stroke or no fill? Three, is the bounding box at the back of the repeat tile? Let's check those things with this pattern. I'm going to go into outline mode Command Y. The first question is, does it have a bounding box? Yeah, there it is right there. Second question; is it invisible? I go up here and confirm that the fill is invisible and so is the stroke. It must be that the bounding box is not in the right place. If I add a fill to it, it's clear that it's not at the back. The way we need to repair this one is right-click and go to Arrange and Send to Back. Now, we can see that all of the motifs are in front of that bounding box and now we just make it invisible and drag it back over to the swatches panel. Now, when we use it to fill our shape, it all works perfectly. Let's go back to the one that wasn't working and figure out why does it look like this exactly. If we remember the idea that every pattern needs to have a bounding box, if we set ours up wrong, it doesn't qualify as a bounding box then Illustrator treats it just like it would any other motif that's in that pattern, and instead, creates its own bounding box. If I get rid of this one and drag our faulty repeat tile out of the swatches panel, you can see that this bounding box has been added. It bumps up against this motif here and along these edges here, and bumps up against that one and this one too. You can see that these motifs fit exactly into this bounding box. If I add a border around this one and drag it in here, now you can see that our repeat is exactly what it is here. That's why it looks so crazy. When you make a pattern and it looks something like this, don't freak out. Just go back and ask those three questions. Is there a bounding box? Is it invisible? Is it in the back? If you solve those three, you should be golden with one exception. Let's say I've made this pattern and I decide that I want to add a background color to it. I can go over and find it in my swatches, drag it out, and then make a background by just making a rectangle that's bigger than the bounding box, fill it with a color, and then send it to the back. Now, of course, we need the bounding box at the back. I'm going to go into outline mode and grab it and then send it to the back. Now we should be good. Drag that over here and fill our rectangle. But it didn't work. Why is that? Well, it has to do with groups. Imagine a bunch of kids waiting for the bus, and this group of kids is from the same class and the teacher says, stay together as a group. Then if the teacher says it's one of them like Zack to the back of the line, that should be over here, except he needs to stay with his group so he ends up lining up right here. In order for him to line up at the true back of the line, he'd have to be released from his group. That's what's happening with our pattern swatch. Whenever you drag a swatch out of the swatches panel, Illustrator automatically makes it into a group. When I use this selection tool and selected that bounding box and tried to send to the back like Zack, I could only send it to the back of the group and not really at the true back. There's two ways we could handle this. We can take this selection tool, click on everything, right-click and choose Ungroup and now I can choose just the bounding box and send that to the back. I want to show you another tool that's useful to diagnose problems and that's the layers panel. Open it with window layers and then let's see what we've got. There's just one layer and in that layer is our pattern, which is in this group, and a rectangle that we've been using for filling to show the pattern and then the background color that we just added. Let's look for the bounding box. If I click on it over here, we can see by the blue dot that it's in the layer and in this group. If I open the group, we see a list of every single path that's in our group. At the bottom is the blue dot so that rectangle layer is the bounding box. But it needs to be below the background color. I can do one of two things. I can drag it out of the group and put it below the background color. Or I'm going to go back here, I can drag the background layer into the group and put it above the bounding box. Now, everything is in the order that it needs to be. Now, when we drag it to the swatches panel, our pattern works just fine. Now you've got several tools that you can use to diagnose bounding box problems. 4. Checking for Alignment Problems: In this lesson we'll go over some alignment or color errors that can be pretty common in your repeat patterns. I'll show you a good trick to check each of your patterns for these kinds of errors. Here's a simple pattern and it's got some problems. Can you see any of them? I can see one of them, but that's only because I made the patterns so I know where it is. Let's go ahead and check it, and the easiest way to do so is to fill a shape with it. Let's turn it into a pattern. I can see that the bounding box goes behind all of the motifs, so I know it's in the right position. So all I need to do is make it invisible and then bring it into the swatches. Then I'll make a shape to fill it. Right away, one of the problems is obvious. The clones for this motif are not lining up properly. But that isn't the only problem with this pattern. If I zoom in, you'll see that this motif isn't lining up either. Sometimes the misalignment can be really hard to catch. Let me show you a trick that I do that makes it a whole lot easier. Let's go back to our swatch and I'm going to go into outline mode. I'm going to make a circle in this upper left-hand corner to use as a marker. I'll get my circle tool. Wherever you want to put it as fine just as long as it crosses both the side and the top of the tile. Then I'm going to fill it with a color that's not in the pattern. In this case, let's make it like a bright green. Now I'll take that and bring it into swatches and fill my pattern with the new one. That green circle marks the edges of our tile. I know if there's alignment problems or color problems which we'll get to in a minute, they will fall along this line or this line. To make it even easier, I'm going to put some guides along those edges. You'll need to have your rulers out. If the rulers aren't visible, you can use the keyboard shortcut Command R, R for rulers. Then I'm just going to drag a guide out and put it along this edge. Not right along the edge perfectly, but just offset and do the same thing on the vertical side. Now when I zoom in, I know that any problems that I have will be along this line. Let's start over here. I moved this way and look right here, you can see there's a very subtle one along here. I would have missed that totally, and I would've missed it if this guide had been right along this edge, I probably wouldn't see it either. That's why I offset the guide a little bit so that I can see these subtle ones happening here. I know I need to fix that one. Now I'm just going to scroll along. This was the obvious one that we saw before. Now we've gotten to the other marker, so we know we're at the edge of the tile. We've seen everything on the horizontal axis, that's going to be a problem. We'll check the vertical axis. There's another problem. We keep going down. That one looks okay. But this one, we're missing the edge of it. That means we forgot to make a clone on this one. We keep going. Now we've gotten to that green marker, so we know we've seen everything. We'll need to go back to our repeat tile and redo the clones. We'll delete them from the bottom and one side and then redo them. So duplicate them from top to bottom and side to side. I'm going to leave the marker there for now so that we can check it again and bring this new one over here, fill it with the new pattern, and then we'll go in and check it one more time. We'll move right into that marker and carefully run along that edge. That one looks good. We've hit the marker so we can go down now. That one looks good and that one and that one. Once we reach to the marker again, we know we've checked everything, so this pattern is now perfect. Then obviously we just go back, get rid of our marker and save the new one without it. Here's another example. Obviously a much more complex pattern this time. This time it's got some color issues. I made the bounding box invisible and we'll select it all and drag it into swatches as usual, then make a shape and fill it with the pattern. The complexity of this pattern makes it almost impossible to check it. It's a really good example of why that marker trick is so valuable. There are some problems in here, but I can't really find them because there's so many motifs. Let's go back and do the marker trick. In this case, rather than make a circle, this motif right here crosses both the top and the side line, so I'm just going to use that as my marker. I'm going to select it and let's pick a color. Let's make it a deep blue because we don't have any dark colors like that in the pattern. Select it again, drag it over, fill the swatch. Now we can see just barely our blue marker right here, right here. I need to see four of those markers. I'm going to have to make a bigger box. I'll use this tool and select one edge and just drag it until I can see that new marker. I know that I need to check this whole line along here and this whole line here. I'll move it over so it doesn't bump into my swatch. Make my guide along here and make another guide right along that edge and go in and check it. If I move along that edge, here's a problem here. See these colors don't line up. Here's another one. The rest of these look pretty good, so I just keep looking until I get to that marker, the blue dot on the other side. There it is. Now I know I've looked through that whole top edge and there was two problems I need to look for in my swatch. Then I'll go down here. If you look really closely here, there's a problem there. Here's another one, there's one, there's another one. Now I've made it back to the marker. Now I've seen all of it. I know I've got some problems in here. I would just need to go back to my swatch, make those changes where there are issues. Then of course, don't forget to change your marker back to the color that it was originally. That's the trick for catching color issues or alignment issues, and you should do that on every single pattern you do, even if you make them in the pattern tool because just things happen or if you accidentally change the size of the bounding box or something like that, those things can happen. So always use this before you send your pattern for output. 5. Solving Hairline Troubles: Have you ever made a pattern and when you go to fill a box with it, you discover that there's little breaks in between your pattern tiles? Sometimes they might be light like these, sometimes they can be dark and you can't figure out for the life what's wrong with your pattern. The good news is there probably isn't anything wrong with your pattern. What this is, is something called an artifact that's just a flaw in the way the pattern is being rendered on your screen but when you output it, it's not going to show up. The best way to test whether it's an artifact is to zoom in and as you zoom in, if that line comes and goes, sometimes it's there, sometimes not especially as you get really close to it that means it's artifact and there's nothing to worry about. Now they are a pain and there's a couple of things you can do to remedy the problem or try to prevent it. The first and easiest thing is just to go to Illustrator Preferences and go down to Performance and make sure that GPU Performance is checked. That should get rid of most of them. Now there are ways to minimize the chances of those hairlines happening. The first is how you add your background color. A lot of people, when they make a background, they'll select their bounding box and Copy it Command C, and then Paste it in Back and fill it with their background color. Now there really isn't any advantage to doing it this way, and there's a couple of problems with it. It's more prone to having hair lines between the pattern tiles plus if you accidentally bump either the bounding box or the background box out of position, then you truly will get a white gap between your pattern tiles that will show up when you output it. I really recommend that you extend the background beyond the bounding box edge. That way you'll have less problems with hairlines and less problems bumping things out of position and getting an actual white line. Also, it helps when you're exporting patterns to JPEG or a PNG file because sometimes if your background is the same size as your bounding box, you will get a white hairline on your JPEG or PNG file. This is really a better way to do it. There are times when hair lines in your pattern will show up on your output and using transparency is one of those situations. If I were to take my background color and change the opacity, let's put it at, I don't know, 50 percent. When I fill the box, you'll see this little dark line in here. It's really tiny, but hopefully, you can see it. No matter how much I zoom in, that line is still there. Notice where it is. When we had the artifact, it went through the entire tile, but this time looking at it's just through the background. It doesn't go across the leaf motifs. That's a good clue for you. That means that the background is the problem. Having a transparent background is causing it to overlap just a tiny bit and cause that little line. In this case, if you want a lighter background, rather than changing the Opacity, change the color up here. Here's a tip if you don't know this if you hold down Option Command and start to move one of the sliders, all of the sliders will move. The hue will stay the same, but everything will get a little lighter. That's a better way to make a lighter background in that same color than using opacity. Now the same is true if we were to make our motifs have a transparency. If I select all of them, make them, let's say 50 percent. I get this. Now because our background is transparent and so are our motifs. Now that line goes through everything. In this situation, there really isn't a good fix for the problem so I really avoid transparency in my patterns as much as possible to avoid this altogether. 6. Cropped Repeat Tiles: Some designers, as a final step in their repeat pattern making process will crop their final repeat tile. To do that, you would go in, find your bounding box, and then right-click and arrange, bring it to the front and now select everything, go to Pathfinder and click on Crop. Now I can understand the appeal of this it's really clean and simple looking. I actually used to do this too with my patterns because I didn't fully understand how bounding boxes worked. But I recommend not doing this. It's a lot more prone to having those artifacts, the hair lines in it and it's also easy to introduce mistakes. Let me show you. Here's a box filled with our pattern and it looks great, except there's a little line down here, maybe that's an artifact so we go in and every time I zoom in, that line is still there. We've got a problem with our pattern so as we did before, I'll go along here and see if we can figure out what's wrong and there it is. Somehow this element has been nudged out of place beyond the edge of the tile and so that's what's causing the line. There's also a vertical line that won't go away so if we zoom way in, you can see that right here is a little tiny spot that's out of place too. If I go back to my pattern tile, that was this item here so if I zoom in you can see that it's out of place but in this case, it's actually not out of place, it has a stroke on it and the stroke is pushing it outside the bounding box. If I get rid of that, now it all lines up and that part should be just fine. But remember there was that other spot too. It's really hard to see, but this one point here is out of place so that tiny little movement that can happen so easy when you're editing something and you just bumped something out of place, it can take so long to figure out what is wrong with the pattern. It's so much easier if you don't crop it like this. The other thing to understand when you crop it, you're changing each element so over here, each element is grouped and so if I wanted to move this flower, I can and it doesn't change anything in the background. But over here, first it's all grouped, so I'll ungroup it by right-clicking. Now I go into move that flower and it's not connected to its stem anymore but when I drag it out, look at it, I've just cut the outline and now each of these elements of that flower are a separate shape and it's cut out from the shapes underneath. Over here, the background is a solid square of black but over here after cropping, it's cut out little pieces of the background. Once you crop your tile, there really isn't any way to make changes in it. If you do for some reason have to crop it, always duplicate it and keep the original so if you do need to go back and make changes, you can do it on that original one. Like I said, I understand the appeal of a neat and tidy cropped repeat pattern tile. But if you're wondering if your client will be confused when you send them a pattern tile, looks like this then consider these examples of hand-drawn early 20th century repeats. They're definitely not neat and tidy, but they also share a lot of same characteristics as our floral repeat. Just trust that when you send a repeat that looks like this to your client, they will know what to do with it. If you're still not convinced there is one other option and that would be to create a clipping mask for your repeat. To do so, you'd go in and find your bounding box and copy it Command C, right-click and paste in front. Let me give that a fill so I know it's in front and this is why. Sometimes when you say paste in front, it just means paste in front of the element that you copied. In this case, it's still not in front so I'm going to right-click again and arrange and bring to front. Now I'll select everything and go to Object, Clipping, Mask, Make. Now we get that crop look but if I look at the outline, you can see that all the elements are still there. If the client or you need to make changes, all you need to do is go into Object, Clipping Mask, Release, and now you're back to the full pattern. That gives you a lot of different options for your pattern tiles. 7. Project & Review: Well done. Congratulations on finishing the class. Now you should have a lot more knowledge and techniques that you can use to diagnose and troubleshoot any technical problems with your repeats. To review, you know that if you've got a really wonky looking pattern, that is probably a bounding box error you need to make sure there's a bounding box, make sure it's invisible, and make sure it's at the back. You have a trick now with the marker to be able to check for alignment and color problems, and you have a better idea when hair line breaks between your pattern tiles are there going to be a problem or when they're just merely an artifact that you can ignore. You learned that it's better to extend your background colors beyond the bounding box and to avoid cropping your repeat tiles. Now these skills may take a little bit of practice. For your project. I have created three patterns that all have multiple flaws in them and I've uploaded the Illustrator file for those to the projects and resources section of the class. You'll find them on the right side of the page right here. To download, just click on the file. If you're on a Mac, you'll have this icon up here. Just click on that, you'll find the file here. Now if you just click it and open it here, it will open as a PDF and you want it to open up as an Illustrator file. Instead of doing it that way, just take that file and drag it down across your Illustrator icon in your dock, and it will open in Illustrator. You can download them, look them over, figure out what's wrong with them and correct them. If you get stuck, there is an answer sheet too. You can get some hints as to what's wrong with repeats. Thanks for taking the class. I do have one favor to ask. If you could take a minute and review the class, that helps me out a lot. Skillshare release stresses having good quality classes on the platform. Reviews are important part to this community. If you want to know when I publish other classes, please follow me. You can also get on my emailing list, where I also provide lots of tips and tricks for both making mockups from my mock-up academy classes and also things about surface design. You can do so on my website, chrisruff.com.