Memphis Design Inspired Pattern in Illustrator - A Graphic Design for Lunch™ Class

1. Create a Memphis Design Style pattern in Adobe Illustrator: Hello and welcome to this course, Memphis Design Inspired Patterns in Adobe Illustrator, a graphic design for lunch class. My name's Helen Bradley and I'm a Skillshare top teacher. I have over 250 courses here on Skillshare, and I have over 155,000 student enrollments. In this class, we'll create a Memphis design inspired pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Now, we're going to do this from scratch, stepping through every process, from creating a color scheme, through creating the objects, and finally, the pattern itself. I'm really excited about this class for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it's a chance for you to work with a design style which is trending in 2022. I also plan this particular class to include a range of Illustrator skills and techniques. It's a learn illustrated by doing class as well. For this reason, the class is going to be suitable for competent beginner as well as intermediate Illustrator users. By the time you've completed this course, you'll have added new Illustrator skills to your toolkit and you'll have created a Memphis design style repeating pattern too. If you're ready, let's get started. 2. Pt 1 Assemble the Colors to Use: Were going to start our Memphis design pattern, not surprisingly, in Illustrator. I'm going to click to create a new file. I'm using something as 1920 by 1080. I am also using RGB color mode. You can make whatever size document you want, but if you want to use some of the dimensions that I'm using, then that's my document size. I'm also going to clear out my swatches panel. I've got my swatches panel visible here. Of course, you can get to any of your panels by choosing Window, and then the panel name. Swatches I want to because I'm just going to clear everything out of here. I'm clicking on the first color, shift clicking on the last group here, and just sending them all to the trash bin, because I made a very limited color palette here. You'll never be able to delete these two, so don't even bother trying, that's fine. We're going to create some colors to use. If you're not really confident about colors or if you'd like some help with inspiration, hit over to color.adobe.com. I've got that open here in my browser, I've already logged in. Up here in the top right corner, I can tell that I'm logged into my account, because I'm seeing the libraries from my illustrator accounts. Just be aware that if your libraries aren't showing up here, you'll need to log in. There's a link up here in the top corner to login. I've already gone looking for what I want and it's pastel. Here in the bar up the top here, I'm just typing in the word pastel. I'm pressing ''Enter'', and we'll see every color scheme that has been associated with the word pastel. In terms of colors for this project, I got some really good results with A, working with a really limited color palette and B, choosing my colors relatively carefully. What I did was I got two blues, a dark and a light, two pinks, a dark and a light, a yellow and something that wasn't quite black, so dark gray. Right now, I'm just going to ignore the dark gray because nothing here is really showing dark gray except for this one over here. I'm looking more for the pinks, blues and yellows or pink, turquoise and yellow, something that I can work with. Here, I seem to have found something that I quite like. I think these colors are going to be pretty good. I think maybe the yellow is not bright enough, but we can deal with that. Having looked at this, we can make changes to any of these, but it will give us a really good starting point. Here are my two pinks, here are my two blues or turquoise, here is something like my yellow. I just need to find something that's not quite black. I'm going to click here to add to library. It's been added to my colors library. If I had been a little bit more careful in choosing the library that I wanted to use up here, I could have actually sent it into a different library, but colors is fine. I'll know where to find it. You can grab more color schemes if you want at this point. You can play around here in Adobe color, but where heading back to Illustrator. We're going to our library's panel because that's where our colors are going to appear. Again, I've got my libraries panel visible here, you can get to it by choosing Window and then libraries. Somewhere in here should be a new color scheme. Here it is, it's not grouped, but that's fine. We've got all the colors that we need. What I want to do is add it to my Swatches panel. I'm just going to right-click on it and I'm going to choose add theme to swatches. All these colors have now been copied from my library into my Swatches panel. They're nice and easily accessible. I am going to have a look at these yellow because I think it could be improved. Let's just double-click on it. You can adjust using RGB, but you don't have to. You can also use something called hue saturation brightness. Sometimes that's actually a better way of adjusting because, I'm just going to turn preview on. I can get a brighter yellow here by just increasing the saturation. Just be aware that you're not stuck with using RGB as your adjuster. I've just brightened up my yellow a little bit. I do need a gray, but I'd like something that's in more pink range. I'm going to click on pink to select it. Then I'm going to double-click on this pink here and I'm going to go for a gray that is a little bit more pink gray rather than than being blue gray, or yellow gray, or green gray, if you like. I'm just going to find my color, just don't want it to be black. I'll click ''Okay'' and now I'm going to add it to my Swatches panel. I do that because it's already the selected the color here. It's just clicking on the plus symbol here and just add it. It's been added as a global color, None of these others are global colors, we can make them global colors. That means that we can easily change the color of objects colored with these colors in the pattern later on. I'm going to click on the first color, shift-click on the last color, go to the flyout menu here, go to swatch options, and I'm going to make them all global colors. Now everything is a global color. If you'd like to have things that you can sample from as you're working, you could go to the rectangle tool, hold the shift key, and drag out a very small rectangle. I'm just going to turn the border off on this, so it's going to be filled with my first color. I'm going to alt option drag on the Mac. It's alt on the PC option on the Mac. I'm going to fill it with my next color. Alt or option drag, not worry that these are going everywhere. Alt or option drag, fill it with my blue. Alt or option drag fill it with my yellow. Let's go and change this one to this sort gray color. Select over everything and just line everything up neatly and we're just going to adjust the vertical distribution. Looks like I've got one color wrong, let me just fix that. We've got our colors now neatly arranged in our document. To make it a little bit easier to work on this document later on, let's go to the last palette. We'll see that colors are all little boxes in the layers palette. Let me just make everything bigger so we can see what's going on. Layers palette, little boxes all filled with color. It will be better for us later on to divide up things which are helpful, which are these from the actual pattern elements. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new layer to this document. Just click here to add a new layer. We're going to work on this layer. For now, we're just going to lock this one. That means we can't select it, we're not working on it, we can't add anything to the layer. These colors are all going to be accessible, but they're not going to be in our way, if you like. Let me just reset my document where already to start at. This point, I suggest you save your document because you're going to be saving it repeatedly as we're working, and that's a really good starting point. In the next video, we're going to start on our shapes. 3. Pt 2 Create your First Shapes: Now we're ready to make our first shape. But before we do that, we want to check on one illustrator preference. Now on the Mac, you'll go to Illustrator and click that to get to your preferences on the Pasi, you're going to choose Edit and then Preference. You want to go to General. The option you want to look out for here is Scale, Strokes and Effects, and you want to disable that. For this particular design, we want all our line work to be the same line width. If we are scaling strokes and effective, we have this turned on. That means that when we make a shape bigger, the line weight is going to get bigger, and so we'll have to fix it each time. If we turn this off, this allows us to make a shape bigger, but without the stroke, the line around the object changing its size at all, it's going to work better for this particular project. If you don't normally have that turned off, do that now. Now the first shape we're going to make is a curvy line. For this we need a stroke, so we don't need a fill. I'm going to turn that off. I'm going to turn the stroke on, and we're going to use this color here, this gray color that we're using. Let's just select that as a stroke color. I'm going to click on the Line Segment Tool. I'm just going to click and drag to the right to create a short horizontal line. Now I have the Shift K press down because that's going to make sure that this is perfectly horizontal. I'm now going to increase the stroke weight, so I'm going to take this up to probably about eight points. That's going to be the stroke weight that I'm going to use throughout this project. You want to settle on something that you like, make this line a little bit bigger. This is because I have chosen shapes and designs that are going to show you a whole range of techniques and tools in Illustrator. This first one for this wiggly line, we're going up here with the shape, select it to effect, and then we're going to distort and transform, and we're going to take zigzag. Now that gives us a pointy line. We're going to make it smooth, so it's rounded, and I want the ends to be at the same level. I want this end here to be up the top. I just need to increase the ridges per segment to five. If I want the line to be a little bit taller so that these loops go further up and further down, then I'll just increase this value. I'm doing that by just clicking here in the box and using the up and down arrow keys on my keyboard just because that happens to be pretty easy for me to do. Once I've got a line looking the way I want the line to look, all I'll do is just click, Okay, and we've got our wiggly line. Now, a wiggly line is actually a line that's got a appearance attached to it. Let's go to the Appearance panel and have a look. Here is our wiggly line, and it's got a zigzag and that can be disabled and enabled. Now later on in this particular course, we want this line to be a line, not a line with an effect attached to it. We won't actually anchor points all the way along these loops. What we're going to do, is going to object and choose Expand Appearance. This turns this into a line so you can see that it's actually got anchor points along its edges. It's now no longer a straight line with an effect applied to it, it is actually a wiggly line and any one of these anchor points could be selected and edited. You can say it's fully editable, but as a wiggly line. Let's check the layers palette and make sure that it's not stuck inside a group because we're going to be very careful about the layers palette here and just continually make sure that things are not trapped inside groups, inside groups, inside groups, because that can happen quite a bit in Illustrator. We've fixed our scale, strokes and effects, and we have created our first shape. Our second shape is going to be a zigzag line. Let's go back and do that since we're working with the same tool. Again, shift, drag a line, again, go to Effect, Distort and Transform, and then zigzag. Now this time I want the zigzag effect. I'm going to just increase the number of ridges per segment. I'm going to increase the height of my zigzag. But I'm not going to use smooth because I actually want this bumpy effect. I'll click Okay. I think it's a little bit big, so I might just drag in on it a little bit, holding the Shift K so that it drags perfectly horizontally. Again, we want this to be broken out so it's no longer just a straight line with an effect applied to it, we want the actual anchor points, so we'll go to Object and then Expand Appearance. Check in the last panel to say that that's all we have. Exactly correct. Now for this one, I want a second one positioned underneath it and offset slightly. Let's go to the Transform tool and just see how that might work to help us to create this effect. Of course, we could move it ourselves, but that's not learning handy tools in Illustrator. I'm going to Effect, Distort and Transform and then Transform. This tool allows me to create multiples of this shape and do things with them. At the moment, our reference point is the center of the shape. Everything's going to happen relative to the center of the shape. That's fine, preview is turned on, I'd like a couple of copies of this. One original, two copies. What I want to do is to move it horizontally, but I'd like to move it about one-third of its distance. I'm actually reading off up here because I can actually see the width of this shape and it's 353. I'd like to move at one-third of 353, and I don't know what that is right now, I'm not prepared to do the math. Let's type in here 353 divided by 3 and hit Tab. That's actually being moved one-third of its distance. Now it went in the wrong direction, I wanted it in the opposite directions, I'm just going to add a minus in front of it, and vertically I'm going to move at one-sixth of its width. Again, 353 divided by 6, and I'm just going to tab away. You can see that we've got this effect where the shape is now moving away from itself. Now all of this is fully editable, so we can have a look at and say, well that's far enough or it's not far enough or whatever we want to change in relation to it. But this transform effect does allow us to create shapes and have them offset from each other, and we could add as many as we like using this. We'll just increase the number of copies and every one of them is in the correct place. On reflection, I think I just want two of them, so I'm just going to make one copy and click, Okay. Now, again, not unexpectedly, this is going to be a shape that has an appearance attached to it. I've lost my appearance panel. Let's just go and get it. Here's my shape and here's the transform effect. We want to break it out of this, so we have independent lines, select the Line, choose Object, Expand Appearance, check our layers palette because here we've got groups inside groups, inside groups. What we do is we select the object and we go to object ungroup, and we continue to do that until ungroup is no longer an option. That tells us that everything has been ungrouped. However, these two shapes are going to be treated as a single shape in future. Let's just go and group them together. What we've done is we've taken them out of the multiple groups that they were stacked into and just made a clean group that only has two shapes in it. This thing is really important if you're selling stock or if you're sharing images with other people. Because the nature you can have your layers palette, the more professional you look, the more people are going to be prepared to buy your art because they know that your layers palette, all your objects are going to be neatly arranged. If everything's just smooshed inside groups or left splattered all over the place, it just doesn't look as professional. We've got our first cut the shapes. Let's go on in the next video to create something different. 4. Pt 3 Draw the Arrow Shapes: Our next shape is going to be a series of small pointy arrow things. To create a pointing arrow, I'm going to use the squares. I'm going to the rectangle tool, I'm going to hold the "Shift" key and just drag out a small rectangle. What I'm looking at is half of the shape. Going to the direct selection tool, the white arrow tool, I'm going to click here on this anchor point, and I'm going to press "Delete". When I do, I'm left with the effective shape that I want. That can be a handy way of creating things if you need perfect angles. Now I'm just going to select and rotate this. I'm holding the Shift key as I rotate it, because then it rotates in 45 degree increments, and that's exactly where I want this shape to be. You can also say that when you cut shapes, sometimes you end up with a bounding box that doesn't accurately reflect the shape itself. If that is of concern to you, you can reset your bounding box. With the shapes selected, you go to "Object" and then "Transform" and you choose "Reset Bounding Box", and Illustrator has a look at the shape and say, "Well in actual fact, this is more what it looks like." Now we want to stack of these in lines, so we'll go back to the "Transform Tool Effect", "Distort and Transform" and then "Transform". We want quite a few of them, maybe about 10, so let's just increase the number of copies to 10. That'll give us one original 10 copies. We want to move this vertically. We're going to start to increase the vertical movement, and that pushes them down the page. If you go the wrong direction, that's fine, just turn around and go the opposite way. Make your numbers negative instead of positive. Now, this is too many of these. I think I want a few less, so we're just going to have a look and see what it looks like. When I'm happy, I'll just click "Okay". Now, every time we use the "Transform Tool", we again have this issue of this being the shape and it's got a transform effect applied to it. We want individual shapes. We'll choose "Object Expand Appearance". No guesses as to what the layers palette might look like. These are going to be inside groups, inside groups, inside groups, and that's exactly what we're seeing here. What I'm going to do is ungroup it. "Object", "Ungroup" until ungroup is no longer an option. Then I've got individual shapes. We'll just group those so we have a single shape that we can do something with. That's our arrows. 5. Pt 4 Create a Circle of Lines: For this next shape, we're going to do a circle that has lines through it. We're not actually going to see the circle itself, it's just that the lines are going to suggest a circle. We're going back to our line drawing tool again, just a horizontal line. It needs to be wider than the widest point in the circle, so let's just make it pretty wide because we're going to lop off the bits that we don't need later on. Now we're going to use a transform effect again to get our lines, the transform tool is really handy for when you want repeated elements because you get to look at them and change them before you commit to them, no other tool works in quite the same way. Effect Distort & Transform, Transform, we want quite a few lines here, so I'm thinking maybe about 12 or so. We want them just to move down the documents, so let's start increasing it. I think I need more lines. The idea here is to have a circle that is just made up of different length lines. We've got the lines, we just need to put it all together now. The first thing I need to do is break this out because again, it's just a line with an effect, it's not individual lines, we can't cut these lines off until they are actually lines. Object, Expand Appearance, and then Object Ungroup again until we can no longer do that, and then we'll just group them together so they act as a single object that will help us just keep things neat and tidy because we can grab them and move them as a group, where we would have trouble if they were individual lines. Now we're going to draw a circle, so we're going to the circle tool, the Ellipse Tool. Hold the Shift key as you draw a circle, don't worry too much about it right now because we need to move it into position, and we're going to do that with the selection tool, the black arrow tool. What we're looking at is how these lines are going to be cut off now, I think it looks fine at the bottom. I think it's wrong at the top, so I'm just going to hold the Shift key and just size down my circle a little bit. I'm just going to arrow it into position, right now I'm thinking I don't need this top and this bottom line and I'm going to lop off all the outside ones. Let's go here to the group selection tool because that's the only way we're going to be able to get inside this group easily to delete this line. I'm just going to delete this one I don't want and I'm going to delete this one because I don't want it either. Now we have to lop off these outer edges, and that can be tricky if you're not familiar with using the Shape Builder tool. You want to select all of these shapes, so everything selected and come over here and find the Shape Builder Tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Live Paint Bucket Tool. Now with the Shape Builder Tool, you can use it to delete things and fill things. The delete option is where you use it with the Alt key on a PC, Option on a Mac. What we're going to do is just run across the lines at the edge here. Don't touch the circle though, so you want plenty of room around here because you don't want to touch the circle because we'd really like to get rid of the circle in one step in a minute, rather than having to get it out piece by piece. Alt, drag just over these lines, just over enough of them to get rid of the lines but not touching the circle, because over here in the last palette, I can see my circle. This is the ellipse and this is the group of lines that are shaped like a circle, so this is what I want to get rid of. I'm just going here in the Layers panel and I can just drop it onto the Delete icon. I could also have selected it and just press Delete. But this is now a group of lines, every one of them is a different length and they are forming a circle. There is another shape. 6. Pt 5 Create the Nested Circles: The next shape we're going to create is a circle that's got a lump in it. We're going to make it two more times apart from the original. This time, the Transform Effect that we've been using is going to fail so we have to find a different way of handling our situation. We're going to see why it fails and we're going to fix it. I'm going to the Ellipse tool and then hold the Shift key and drag out a small circle, making sure that I'm working with my 8 point stroke, which I am. I want to cut a piece out of the side of the circle so I can thicken it up. I'm going to select over the circle and I'm going to the Scissors tool. It shares a toolbar position with the Eraser tool. Click on the Scissors tool and now you can click on the line that forms a circle and cut it. I'm going to cut it in two places only. Click at once here to cut it here, and click again to cut it down here. Now if you see over here in the Layers panel, we've ended up with two distinct shapes. We've got two shapes where previously we had a circle, now we've got two bits. It's going to stick them back together again. What I want to do is select this smaller piece, and I want to thicken up the edge. So I'm going to increase the stroke weight here to 12. Now if we were to zoom in, we would see that we've got really blunt ends on this. If we want nicer ends, we can round them. Select the shape and go to stroke and make it a rounded cap. The rounded cap sticks out far enough that it's actually covering up the end of this shape underneath because this shape underneath is also going to have blunt ends, but we're not seeing those because it's being covered up by the shape that's got the rounded end. They stick out a bit more if you like. Now, this is a single shape and we want to treat it as a shape so we're going to group it. It's going to travel as a single shape. It's going to behave as a single shape right now. Now, I promised you that the Transform Effect would fail here, let's see why. Effect, Distort and Transform, Transform. I want to make this about 140 percent, the size of the original. Make it 140. Let's make one copy. That's fine. Two copies, not so good. Three copies, disaster. Four copies, this is not an even sizing. Let's have a look why. When you use the Transform Effect and you say, I want to increase the size of my shape, the shape is going to be increased to 140 percent of its original. Then Illustrator says, well, I've got this shape now, I'm going to make it 140 percent. It was larger so 140 percent of something larger becomes even larger, and then 140 percent of this becomes even larger. We've got some really strong growth happening here. Where we wanted even growth, we're just not seeing that. Let's go and get rid of this appearance. Let's go to the Appearance panel. We don't need to do anything because the Transform is just an effect that's applied to the circles, so I can drag it onto the trash can and is permanently gone. Now let's have a look at this circle that we want to increase in size, but we want a nice, steady, linear, even increase. This time we're going to use Object, Transform, and we'll use Scale. We're going to type in 140 percent here. We can't see what the original looks like. That's a downside to using this tool, but we have to use it because the other tool doesn't work. I want the original plus this new size one, so I'm just going to click "Copy". Now we already know that we can't take this outer shape and make it 140 percent because that would start this increased growth. This accelerating growth, which is what we don't want to happen. Remembering that we got from this size to this size by increasing it to 140 percent, we can go from this size to the next one by going to 180 percent. The next one after that would be 220 percent. We're just adding 40 percent extra to each iteration of the scale. I'm going back to this smallest shape. I'm going to Object, Transform and then Scale. I'm going to make it 180 percent, and I'm just going to click "Copy" so I get the original plus my new copy. Now we've got even spacing. It would be possible to make the calculation as to what you needed to add to this shape to make this one, but then from this to this one is going to be different again and different again. They are going to be fractional numbers and you have to do some fairly fancy math to do it so I'm just opting for something simple. From here to here, we added an extra 40 percent. To get from here to here, we're adding 80 percent. From here to here, we would add an extra 120 percent. These shapes, let's have a look at them in the Layers panel and see what we've got. They're just groups with the two shapes in it. This is one circle, this is one circle, this is one circle. Let's group them all together so that now they travel as one because they are an object that we're going to use inside our final pattern. 7. Pt 6 Create the Nested Potato Shapes: For this next shape, let's have a look at something that behaves like this, but is an uneven edge. We're going to use yet another tool because we have another tool that will work here really nicely. Let's go and get the pencil tool so it shares a toolbar position here with the shape bar tool. We're going to the pencil tool, double-click on it because you want it to be smooth. We want a really smooth shape. I'm just going to click "Okay." I'm going to draw something that looks a little bit like a potato. It's going to come round here, squidge in here and back over to our starting point. When you see the mouse pointer has a hollow sort in the bottom right corner, that means that you're about to join this line up. Perfect. Just let go the left mouse button and we have got our shape. Now I'm drawing with a mouse, if you're using a tablet, you're going to get much better results in this mouse is really jumpy. That's why it looks pretty awful when it's being drawn. But the result, because we use that smooth option on the pencil tool, is we've got a pretty nice shape. Now if you want to smooth it out further, go to the smooth tool. With it selected, you can just run around here and make the sides smoother. If you've got lots of anchor points, you can simplify it with object, path and then simplify. Now they changed this dialogue recently. Just click here on the three letters and you can get your simplified dialogue back out. Here you can make the shape a little bit different so you can smooth it out. It's not going to affect this particular shape much because it was pretty smooth anyway, but that is another option that you can use. Let me just scale this down so I have a slightly smaller starting point. Holding the Shift key, I'm maintaining the proportions of this shape. Again because we didn't have Scale, Strokes and Effects turned on, it's still an eight point line, even though the shape is much smaller. Here let's have a look at how we get this potato shape to create some nested shapes. We're going to use a different tool and we can do that because we've just got a single line here. Object Path, this time we're going to use offset path and what offset path does is it creates another shape, the same as the previous one, offset from it at the moment 10 pixels. Let's go a bit higher. I'm just looking, visually, I really like this tool for visual look. We can see here if we are getting the right spacing. I'm looking for something that's pretty visibly similar to this one. Might go up just a little bit. I'll click, "Okay". That increase was 26 pixels. I'm going to click on this shape. I'm going to do Object Path, Offset Path. I Still got my 26 pixels in, I'll just click "Okay" and so we could continue making this larger each time by just using offset path and it's going to use that same value. The difficulty with this tool, if you like, is it can start to break down. You can see that we're getting a really sharp edge here. Well, we didn't start with a sharp edge is not perfect, but it is a handy tool if you want to create these effects. I'm going to remove the last one of those. I think I just want three of my potato shape. Again, we could smooth this out if we wanted to. We could do all sorts of things. I'm just going to group these because I want them to be another object in my design. For the same reason as we couldn't use the distort and transform tool to create this circle at increasing shapes, we can't use the distort and transform tool on the potato shape to make these evenly scaled because it just doesn't work that way. 8. Pt 7 Create Repeated Grids of Shapes: The next shape we're going to create is going to be a greed of shapes. Then we're going to use two different shapes. We're going to use a circle and a triangle. The circle is going to be filled. I'm going to the Ellipse tool, I'm just going to use fill rather than stroke and I'm going to drag out a nice small ellipse. Holding the shift case off, I've got a circle. I think it might be a little bit big, so I'm just going to make it a bit smaller. Now I'm going to create a triangle. For that we're going to the Polygon tool. We're just going to click once in the document to set up the polygon tool. A triangle has three sides, so we're just going to give it three sides. Radius, absolutely no clue what it's going to look like relative to the door, don't worry about that. Just click "Okay", because we can size that once we get it in the document. Trying to judge what radius you need for the triangle that you need is just fraught with difficulty. Click "Okay". Now firstly, I want it to have a stroke and not a fill, so I'm going to bring my stroke backup to the eight points that we're using. Then you look at my triangle and determine how big I want it to be. It's too big, so I'm just going to bring it down in size. I'm also going to bring down my circle a bit in size. I'm going to line these up so that they're lined across their middle. For this, I'm actually going to open the align panel because it just might be a bit easier to see. Let's go and grab the align panel. Firstly, we want their middles to be lined up. That's this option here, vertical aligned center. They're nicely aligned for now. I want these two to travel together, so I'm just going to move them a bit closer. I'm using the shift case, I'm not losing that alignment. I think this is the spacing I want between these shapes. Select over them and I'm going to group them because I want them to be treated as a pair that are working just fine. I'm going to Alt drag a duplicate away, and Alt drag another duplicate away. I'm not really worried about getting it perfect because we're going to look at how the align options work here. Select either everything I've got, group, group, group. I'm going to make sure that they're aligned vertically in the middle, so let's just click that, and I want them to be evenly spaced. What I'm going to do is use this option which is horizontal distribute center. If I click on that, you can say that they jumped a little bit. The reason for this is that they are being treated as groups, so we are making sure that all the groups are evenly spaced. This group, this group, and this group. I'm going to select all of these and I'm going to make a group out of them. Now because it's easy to do, I'm just going to option drag a couple of these away. I'm going to use four of these. All I wanted to do now is to make sure that the spacing is correct. I'm just going to put them a little bit more spaced out so they look a little bit more like what I want them to look like. Select over all of them. These are four groups. I'm going to make sure they're nicely centered, horizontal align center. Now I want them to be spaced out nicely. Since they're in a group, I can use this option which is vertical distribute center. But I want to make sure before I use it that I don't have aligned to art board selected, I want to align to selection. Let's click on "Align to Selection", let's try that again. Now you can see that they're now evenly spaced. We've got a block of objects all nicely evenly spaced. Select over them, let's make a group out of them. They're all going to travel as a group. While we're making some nice shapes to use, let's make a set of dots as well going through the Ellipse Tool, create a small circle. For this we're going back to our transform effect. Effect distort and transform, transform. It's going to work perfectly in this situation. I would like about five dots in a row. That means four copies going to the horizontal, and I'm just going to start pushing these along, increasing this value. I'm just looking at roughly the spacing that I want to use. I'll click "Okay" because we can't go across and down in the same transform, but we can go across and down with two transforms. With this selected now let's go back to effect, distort and transform and transform. We're going to get a warning. We're going to get a warning that there's already a transform on this circle. If you meant to edit it, this is not the right tool to use. But if you really mean to add a second effect, then keep going. Well, we really mean to add a second effect because we want to take this shape and move it down. We're going to choose apply new effect. This time we're going to make copies, I'm thinking probably about seven more, then we're going to move them down. Now it would have been really helpful for me to have known what my initial transform was like, what the value was for moving them across so I can move them down exactly the same amount. Let me actually just set this to 66 pixels. Let's go back into the appearance panel for this shape and let's see what this transform is. Well, it was 76 on the first one. If I want to make these exactly the same, I'm just going to make it 66. Or I could come back in and change this one to the 76. But you can get into these transform effects by just opening up the appearance panel and click on them and you can make edits to them. None of this is setting concrete until such time as you expand them. Of course that's the next step , Object Expand Appearance. Now object ungroup because we know we're going to get groups inside groups, inside groups, there's a lot of these, three times. Now we've got individual shapes, we're just going to with them still selected, just group them all together so now we have one shape that is all of those little objects. If you haven't already, now's a good time to save your document or save it again, just to make sure you've got all of these objects before we go on with the next shapes that we're going to create. 9. Pt 8 Create the Two Tone Rectangle: So far we've done a lot of work creating just lines or shapes. It's time now to create a couple of colored shapes using the colors that we're working with. We're going to start with a rectangle. I'm going to click on the rectangle toolbar. I want to choose this color to use. Let's just go to the eyedropper and select that color. I'm going to drag out a narrow rectangle. Now I want it to be angle so what I'm going to do is I'm going to the direct selection tool. I'm going to click away from the object so nothing is selected. I'm going to select over just these top two points, and I'm going to drag this to the right. That gives me a shape that now has a little bit of movement in it because it's angled. I also want to cut it in two and I want to use this as a cutting guide. I want a wiggly line cuts through this shape. I'm going to make a duplicate of this shape. I'm going to alt, drag a copy of it over. That's really important. I'm going to place this using the selection tool, grab it and place it over my rectangle. Now you can see it's gone behind the rectangle. The reason for that is that there's a stacking order in the layers palette in Illustrator. I think that a creative first at the bottom. We need to move this line to the top. Let's choose object arrange and bring to front. We want it right on top of everything. I think my rectangle is a little small, so I'm just going to drag it. I'm making full use of this curve that I've got. But there are a few critical things here. Firstly, the curve has to be a line, that's why we took the trouble to expand it earlier. We didn't just leave the effect in place because otherwise it can't be used for this particular technique. The other thing is I want the curved line to extend beyond the rectangle. Doesn't have to extend too far, but it does have to extend beyond the rectangle at the point where I'm making my cut. Just making sure I've got a really nice combination of this is going to be my cut line and this is my rectangle. To do this effect, we're going to use this line to cut the rectangle and we select this line but nothing else. You can't select the rectangle, it won't work. With the line selected, we're going to choose object path and then divide objects below. We're using the line that we have selected to divide everything that is below it into multiple pieces, using that line as a cut, if you like. That's what we've got. Two pieces of this shape now cut along that line and you'll see that the line has been sacrificed. That's why we made a duplicate of it because it's been sacrificed in the process. Now, this lets us take this shape and color as a different color. I'm going to use my second color here. But of course, this is really a single shape. We want all the pieces to travel together, so we'll select them and group them. Checking on our layers palette to make sure that everything is neat and tidy. 10. Pt 9 Create Two Colored Triangle Objects: For this next shape, we're going to make a triangle that has an offset edge to it. We're going back to the Polygon Tool and click in the document. We're going to make a three-sided shape and whatever the radius is, just click, "Okay." I'm going to make this just a filled shape right now. I'm just looking at my triangle and working out roughly how big I want it to be. I'm pretty happy with this. I've experienced some problems with the latest versions of illustrator and this is why I'm making this triangle into pieces because I'm not getting good results or the results that I would expect when I expand a triangle, it has a stroke around it. It's coming out as a Compound Path and then a filled shape. That's not the way that it used to work and that's not going to work for us here either. Let's just take this triangle and let's all drag a second one away. What we want to do with this one is we want it to have a stroke and we want the stroke to be this brown color. I'm just going to double-click on the color. We'll go to color swatches and we can pick up our brown color here. This is another good argument for cleaning out the swatches palette when you have a document where you really only want a very limited number of colors because then, when you select color swatches, you are only going to be faced with the colors that you have set up in the swatches panel, just makes life a little bit easier. Of course this is going to have an eight point stroke around it. This is my shape. In fact, I think I'll make this a darker filled blue. I'm looking at how these two shapes are interacting with each other. I'm going to place these where I want them. I'm concerned that I'm going to be reusing this shape in a minute. If I'm going to make changes in size I'm going to make it to the colored shape. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. Therefore, I'm going to treat these two shapes as an object. It's a very simple object for our design. Again, we want to group it because we want them to travel together. I'd like to reuse this triangle so let's go to the last pallet and let's find it. Here it is. It's a polygon. I want a copy of it right now it's buried inside a group. It's very easy to select here in the last palette, you could also select it with the Group Selection Tool, so you could just click on it and that would be a selection of it. We're going to choose edit copy. Then we're going to choose Edit Paste. What that does is it not only makes a copy of this shape, but it breaks the copy out of the group. Here's the group, the original group. It's still behaving exactly as we would expect it to. But here is other triangle which is exactly the same size as the previous one. This is more like what I would expect to have happen. Eventually I want two copies of this triangle, but for a start I want to change the color of this so I'm going to choose my darker blue. Here's my darker blue. I'm going to make a duplicate of this. I will drag it away, and this is going to be my lighter blue. In the color swatches. Here's my light blue. Let's zoom in here. What I want to have happen is I want this part of this triangle to be behind the blue one. To do that, we're going to need to use the Shape Builder Tool but before we do that, we need to make sure that this triangle is actually a Compound Path, not a path. I want to show you that, that is necessary. I just didn't want to grab a Compound Path because I happen to have one sitting there without explaining to you that if you're working on paths, these have to be filled shapes before you can use the Shape Builder tool. I'm selecting all of these, I'm just going straight to Object and then Expand. What that's going to do is give us filled shapes. You can see that the indicators around this shape and now around the outside, they're not pointing out a path they're pointing out filled shapes. If we go to the last panel here, you'll see that we've got two Compound Paths. Just be aware that before you use the Shape Builder Tool, you need to have filled shapes, so they've got fills, not strokes. Let's select over these. Let's go to the Shape Builder Tool shares as a toolbar position with the Live Paint Tool. Using the Shape Builder Tool, we can join things together. What I want to happen is I want this green shape, this light shape to go behind the blue one. We can suggest that by bringing the blue color through here. I'm just going to drag through this area here. I'm joining that small piece of the green shape, in actual fact the blue shape and it's going to be filled with the blue color. If it's not, we can easily add that blue color. We've now got this impossible triangle effect where the green, this light green triangles running behind the darker one and then in front of it. Nice little effect, very easy to do with the Shape Builder Tool. These two objects are not actually grouped together. What we're going to do is we're going to break them out of their groups because they're in individual groups. We're going to ungroup them until that's what we see over here in the Layers palette, and then let's group them together as a single group. These two objects are going to travel together because they do form a single object. 11. Pt 10 Create the Offset Dots Element: The last of the actual shapes that we're going to create before we attack our painting lines are going to be circles, and they're going to be offset circles. We're going to use a really interesting feature of the Appearance panel. What I'm going to do is choose the "Ellipse tool" and I'm just going to drag out a small circle. It's going to be a filled circle. But in this case, I would like to fill it with one of my pink colors. I'm going to choose the darker pink color. I'm going to the Appearance panel because we can do interesting things in the Appearance panel. What I'm going to do is duplicate this fill. I'm going to click on it. I'm just going to click the plus sign. That makes a second fill for this shape, and for that, I'm going to fill it with the lighter pink color. What I want to do is I want to take this circle. I want to make it smaller, and I want to position it up here. It's really tricky stuff, but there's a tool that we have already used that's going to do all the work for us, and it's the Transform panel. You want to make sure that you've got the second, the lighter fill, the one that's on top selected. Then you'll go to Effect, Distort and Transform, and then Transform. This time, instead of transforming a shape, we're transforming a fill which just happens to be a circle. I want this to be much smaller than it is, so I'm going to make it 50 percent of the original shape. You can see here clearly, we've now got a dot in the middle of this shape that is 50 percent of the size of the original. We want to move it, so we want to move it in this direction. That is going to be a positive horizontal direction and a negative vertical direction. But if you get it wrong, you can just go the opposite direction. I'm just going to finesse this into position. I'm thinking minus 40 and plus 40 will work for the size, shape that I've got here. I'm just going to click "Okay". Now I have a shape. In the last palette, it's just registering as a single ellipse shape, but it actually looks like two because it's got two fills in it. Here is the transformation on this second fill. We can turn the second fill off, and then we can apply this transformation to it, which moves it out of the way. The Appearance panel is really, really powerful. You can do lots of things with the Appearance panel. This just happens to be one of them. I'd like a blue copy of this, so I'm going to Alt or Option drag a duplicate away. Let's go into the Appearance panel for this shape. I've lost my Appearance panel. Let's just go and get it. For this one, I want to change the lighter color to the turquoise, and I want to change the fill color of the main color to the blue. Now I've got the same shape twice, just in different colors. 12. Pt 11 Create the Paint Strokes: The last of the elements that we need for our Memphis effect are actually some paint strokes. For this, we're going to use the Paintbrush tool. You go to the brushes panel. Of course, if yours is not showing you, just go to Window and then Brushes. We're going to this little icon down here, which is the Brush Libraries menu. We're going to Artistic, and then we're going to Artistic Paintbrush. This gives us a lot of really solid paintbrush strokes. I'm going to choose one of them right now, click on it. I'm painting with my pink color. I'm just going to draw a line in the document. Now, this is not a particularly good line for our Memphis effect but we can fix it. I'm going to select Overline. I'm going to increase the stroke because that's going to make it fatter if you like. What I wanted is just a few paint strokes that look pretty much like this. Right now I think I would like it to be the darker pink color. Let's just go and make it the darker pink color. It's going to be easier to work with if it's expanded so that it becomes a shape not a stroke line with a paintbrush effect applied to it. We're going to choose Object and then Expand Appearance. Now we can size it any way we like, and we can do all sorts of things to it. I just think it works better for this design that it's actually expanded into a filled shape. Let's go and make another one of these. For this, we need to make sure that we do not have this one selected while we're about to apply a paint stroke to that. We'll go to the paintbrush tool. We'll choose a different paintbrush and we're going to draw a small line. Again, we're going to select Over, we're going to make it much wider so that we get this painterly shape. If you don't like it, just go and find a different paintbrush to apply to it. You're still going to have that line but you just going to have a different brush shape. I like that but I think it's too wide. Then we'll just expand it. Object, Expand Appearance, and then it becomes a single shape. I'm going to make a couple more shapes this time using the yellow color that we haven't used so far, making sure that I deselect anything before I start working on color. Going to the paintbrush, let's go and get a different brush. Just looking at the basic proportions here, expand it, and then I'll do one long brushstroke, making sure I don't have anything selected before I attack that. Now we have all the elements created that we're going to use to put together our Memphis style pattern. In the next video, we're going to start working on the pattern. If you're following along as we're doing this, save your document before you finish up. I suggest that you save it a couple of times. Perhaps save it as Memphis elements and then save another version as Memphis pattern so that you've still got these elements. Again, we had some problems with Illustrator lately coming out of the Pattern Make tool and my pattern objects had been totally destroyed. I don't want this to happen to you. I would be working at this stage on a duplicate of these elements so that if they get destroyed in the pattern-making process, you're still going to have a file with those elements in it. 13. Pt 12 Make Your Pattern: I'm now working on a duplicate of my original file. Since I probably don't need these colors, I'm going to go into the last palette and I can actually get rid of those colors at this stage or I can just turn that layer off, so it's not visible. I want to work with my pattern on as larger an area as I can, and I don't want to be hamstrung by seeing the Artboard here, as I'm working. It just gets in the way when you're designing big patterns like this. I'm going to choose "View", and I'm going to hide Artboards. If you're concerned about your computer's performance at this stage you could close down anything that is open that you don't need to have access to. For me, that's going to be my browser. I'm going to turn that off, so that my computer has all the power necessary for doing this work. I'm going to select everything. That's just Control or Command A, that selects absolutely everything here. I'm not concerned about my starting point. I just want everything selected, so I have a nice big pattern tile, if you like. I'll choose Object, Pattern, Make. I'll click, "OK", so our pattern has been added to the Swatches panel. I'm just going to tuck that away, and I'm going to zoom out. Because this is what my pattern looks like right now, just based on making a selection of all the elements that I've just created, so that just gives you an idea as to where we're working here. I'm also going to increase the number of copies. This has got nothing to do with the final pattern, but it just allows you to see a bit more of a filled area, so you can see what your pattern might look like as you're developing it. Now, the Show Tile Edge will show us where our work area is. These are the only shapes that we can actually select right now. I'm going to make this tile, width, and height a nice even number. I'm going to take it as nearly 1,905. I'm going to make it 2,000 wide. It's 1,026 tall, so I'm just going to make it 1,000 pixels tall. Now, it's set to change. I don't want it to change, so let me just change that. Make it actually 1,100. It's a nice even size pattern. Actually, I think I might bring it back down a bit. Let's make it a 1,000. It's closing in a little bit. Now I also want this to be a more sophisticated pattern. This one's a grid. We could use, for example, Brick by Row, and do a half offset. So that this is a pattern, this is a pattern, this is a pattern. But there's a more sophisticated one still, and that's Brick by Column with a half offset. Although it doesn't look like it right now, this is a more sophisticated pattern, because right now, we cannot even see this element again in this document. We see this element here and this element here, so our pattern piece is actually really, really big. It's just that it doesn't look particularly good yet. The thing that we need to do now, is just to start moving things around. We're going to develop the basics of our pattern by just moving objects around, and building our pattern. It might help when you're starting off to have the tile edge showing, so that you can actually see where you're working. That's going to be a little bit helpful. Now the other thing that you'll see that's happening here, is that my paint strokes, because I did them last. They're actually on top of the elements that we created first. Now if you don't want that to be the case, and you probably warned, you need to go and select these, and you need to bring them to the bottom. You need to shift them all, if you like. I've got them selected, I'm going to choose "Object Arrange", and I'm going to send them to the back. Now, my paint strokes are behind my actual objects. I'm thinking too, that my tile is a bit wide, so making sure that these are not linked, I'm going to bring the tile widths down a bit. I think, maybe 1,600 is going to close up that spacing a bit better. I'm much happier with that. Now, I'm just going to start moving things around. If I want to duplicate, I'm just going to Alt or Option-drag on a Mac, a duplicate of the shape away, and then I can resize it. I can put it in different places, rotate it, just get some interesting effects. From here, basically, you're just going to be moving these elements around to create your pattern. You can see why it was so important to group objects. Because otherwise, they're just going to go everywhere, and it's going to be really difficult to move them. What you want to do, as you're designing this, is just have a look at the background and just see how things are looking. As well as duplicating individual paint strokes, you can also duplicate these shapes with Alt and Drag. I've just created a second one of this dot here. Now you might say that there are a couple of problems happening with this design. One of them, is that while this shape here is appearing behind these shapes here, as soon as I move it to the bottom of the design, it's painting over the top of this shape, even though it's at the bottom of the layer stack. Even though I select it and choose "Object", "Arrange", "Send to Back", it's not actually going behind this shape. Now the reason for that, is this Overlap option here. If we change the Overlap, we're going to get a different result, but we need to make sure that when we change the Overlap, we don't disturb other things in the process. Here's another problem here. We've got objects that are in the wrong place here. You're going to have that anytime something of the objects that are in this tile area, go over the edge. What you want to do if you want to control this better, is only have them go over the edge on one edge. This one is going to go over this edge. We don't want to make anything up here, that is a sort of painterly object, go over this top edge. Because as soon as we do, we're going to have problems. Here, I've got an object that's going over this edge, but it's causing problems over here. I may be able to solve that by changing the overlap or I might just have to move the objects. Moving it, is going to solve it better. Now, I'm looking at this green object everywhere it appears, and just make sure it's not doing silly things with some of my black objects. I'm going to grab this one, and move it though. I just want to check that everything is behaving correctly. This one is overlapping things, I'm not really happy with that, I might mix it up with something else. Just making sure everywhere these two triangles appear, they're actually appearing on top of the other objects, and not behind them. Now, if you want to have a look at how your design is going, you can turn off the tile edge. That will give you an indication as to how things are looking. This is looking a little bit rigid to me, so I'm just going to have another look at this object. I'm going to make a duplicate of this shape. Alt, drag it away. Now you can continue to work on your design until you're happy with how it looks. I would do some more work on this, but I'm just concerned now, that we go ahead and have a look and see what we can do with the design form here. Once you've got your design looking pretty much the way you want it to look click "Done". This time Illustrator hasn't made a total mess of my elements. But last time, I promise you, it made a really big mess of them. We want to turn our Artboard back on, so we're going to do View and then Show Artboards. I'm going to tuck these elements to one side, so we can have a look at our pattern. We're going to do that in the next video. 14. Pt 13 Recolor Your Pattern: Now we're ready to look at our finished pattern, and to do that, we're going to create a rectangle the size of the artboard. In my case, that's 1920 by 1080. I'm going to align it to the artboard, and I'm going to fill it with my pattern. I've got my fill selected, so let's go to my Swatches panel, and here is my pattern. Now my pattern is much bigger than the actual shape that's containing it, so we're going to with the shape selected, go to Object, Transform, and then Scale. We're going to transform the pattern, not the objects. We are going to turn off Transform Objects, we're going to turn on Transform Patterns, and we're going to drop this uniform value to say something like 50 percent. That gives us a look at this patter. This is this object, this is this object. We're seeing the full width of our pattern here. I'll click "Okay," and I'm going to press "Control," and then "0" to zoom into our design. At this point again, we're going to save the document just in case something happens with our computer. This is the pattern that we've created, but if you don't like the colors or if you want to finesse the colors from here, that's very easily done. Probably the easiest way to do it is if you've got your pattern in front of you, is to select the object with the pattern in it and go up here to the re-color artwork tool. In the most recent versions of Illustrator, this tool has changed a bit. You want to come down here to Advanced Options, so you can actually see what you need to use and we're going to edit. What this is showing us is all the colors in our design. Right now, it says here to click to unlink them, so they're linked. What happens when they're linked is that if we rotate these colors around, the colors are all going to change, but they're going to maintain the same spatial relationship between the colors. You're going to get colors that are in the same color relationship that this color here is opposite the mid-range between these two colors, so they're in a triad arrangement, if you like here. I can drag outwards to change the saturation of the colors, but basically they're going to maintain that same spatial relationship. Now if you want to break the spatial relationship, you can click here to unlink the colors, and that allows you to take these colors anyway you want them to. We could add some more orange in here, and we could take these purply things into a more red area, we can break up the colors so that we don't have them as tone on tones, and we could take this one and go up into the pinks, for example. You can completely change the look of your pattern color-wise using this recolor artwork dialogue. Now you're not going to lose anything this way because we're working on the pattern inside a shape. Illustrator has a protection against destroying our original pattern, so I'm just going to click "Okay." Here in the Swatches panel, you see that we've got two patterns. This is the original pattern, and this is a brand new pattern based on those new colors. Anytime you use the recolor artwork dialogue and create a new color, you're actually ending up with a new pattern. Of course, this pattern can be edited, so I'm actually going to edit the original. That's not going to affect my recolored version, so any changes I make now to the original pattern, not to the recolored version. I'm going to double-click on this and that opens up the pattern dialogue again, and so I can just zoom out. You can see what a mess it looks like if you don't hide that artboard, so let's go back up to View, and Hide Artboards, so that we can see where we're working, turn on the tile edge. Now we can say what's available to us. I'm going to move this circle a little bit, try and change the way this area looks. This is a change to my patterns, so I'm just going to click here on "Done," and so my original pattern has now changed. This is the newly designed pattern, and if I click here, you'll see this is what it used to look like. If you wanted to keep this original and also change it, what you would do is drag it onto this new icon here so that you've got two copies, and so you could change one but still maintain the existing arrangement of elements. 15. Pt 14 Make a Second Pattern: Now once you've made your first pattern, you could make a second pattern. I'm just going to bring all of these elements back into the work area. I'm going to turn the artboards off again. I might have a look at this pattern elements and decide that there are some that I don't want to use this time. For example, I may not want to use this group and I may not want to use this group, but I'll use everything else. I'll select over just these objects and then go to object pattern make. The objects that I'm not using are moved well out of the way and now I can go and choose what sort of grid I want to use. This time I'm going to use brick by row. It's a slightly different pattern. I'm going to make sure that this indicator here has a line through it so that these two width and height are independent of each other. I'm going to round them off to 1,600 and about 1,000 here. I'm going to zoom out so I can see things a bit more clearly. I'm also going to choose to say a lot more of my objects. Now I'm just going to go as I did before and just move things into place. Just being really careful about things that overlap the edges and just making sure that they're not blocking other elements out. Altering the layering of objects if I need to. This object here is underneath the paint line, but I can probably solve that by changing one of these overlaps. Let's solve that. I need to make sure that it doesn't throw anything else out in the process. Check your pattern by turning off the tile edge and just make sure that everything looks as you want it to. You'll need to turn your tile edge back on potentially to be able to say the objects that you can move, because you can only move objects that are actually inside the tile age. None of these others are selectable. That's just something you need to be aware of. If you're happy with your design, when you're happy with your design, just click done, and you'll go back to having a brand new pattern here in the swatches palette. To finish off, you will want to show your artboards again, I'm just going to move all these objects out of the way. I'm going to re-create my 1920 by 1080 rectangle. I'm going to center it up on the artboard, I've got its fill selected. Let me just turn its stroke off, I don't want it to have a stroke and it's filled with my new pattern, I can check here. I'm going to choose object transform scale, and bring the scale of it down. Not wanting to transform the objects, but just the scale of that pattern control and zero to zoom in to see what my design looks like and of course from here, if I want to recolor it easily done, just select the Recolor Artwork dialogue, going to Advanced Options, Edit, do whatever I want in here in terms of changing the colors, I think I might just rotate them. Let's check. They're linked at the moment. I'm just going to rotate them a bit, unlink them, get rid of this green color that I don't particularly like. Let's go into pinks and oranges, Click Okay, and now in the swatches panel I've got the new pattern I made and a recolored version of that new pattern. At this point you can just play around with creating patterns from the elements that you have created. One thing I didn't mention was that when you're actually in Pattern Edit mode, I've just gone into it by just double-clicking on the pattern, you can actually add additional objects. If we wanted just a filled circle, for example, I'm just going to draw a filled circle here. It's being filled right now with the pattern, that's a bit of a danger. What we're going to do is make sure that we select a color for it and it's now filled with blue color. That's now part of the pattern, even though it wasn't one of the objects that we originally designed. When we come out of this pattern make tool, this blue dot is not going to exist. When you're creating the pattern elements, it's better to create them outside the pattern make tool because otherwise they won't exist. They exist inside the pattern, but not as objects that you can reuse for another patent another time. Let's just prove that. Let's click Done and let me just zoom out. While that blue dot is there as part of the pattern, because we've got this rectangle filled with the pattern. The blue dot does not exist as one of these objects, so we can't use it again, we would have to recreate it. For a blue dot that's not a big thing but if it was one of these shapes like this circle or something like these circles here that were more time consuming to create, you want to create them outside of the pattern make tool so that you can reuse them for other patterns at other times. 16. Pt 15 Save the Patterns for Reuse: Now there just a couple of things that I want to talk about before we finish up here. One of them is this global colors, because of these have all got little triangles in the corner they are global colors. The way global colors work is that you don't have to have something selected to make changes, so if I want to this darker pink to be a different color, I could just click on the color itself. I'm going to choose Preview and I'm going to darken it up by increasing its saturation, and you can see that everything here that is colored with that global color has now changed even though it wasn't selected, that's how global colors work. They do give you quite a bit of flexibility, not only in designs like we're using here, but in actual fact in any design in Illustrator. The other thing I want to cover is how do you save these patterns? Because once you've got a wonderful collection of Memphis patterns, you'll want to distribute them, you might want to sell them. The first thing I'm going to do in terms of saving my patterns is I'm going to choose File and Save to save my document. Then I'm going to focus on my Swatches panel, and I'm going to ditch this document, so I'm not going to save this document. At this stage I'm not going to make any changes to my pattern or any my elements or anything else, all I'm going to do is clean up the swatches palette so that I can actually save my patterns. Firstly, what I'm going to do is come in here and delete all of my colors, so I've got this selected, I'm just going to drag them onto the trash can. It doesn't actually delete them, just deletes the color group. Now let's drag them onto the trash can, because we don't want to save our colors, and we'll also get rid of any patterns that we don't want. I want this pattern and for example, I just want the original pattern I created, so I'm going to grab the others and delete them. The only two patterns left in this document are these two and there are no color swatches, nothing else that I want to give to anybody, so I don't want to give them my color schemes or anything, I just want to give them these two patterns. What we'll do here is select this fly-out menu and choose Save Swatch Library as AI. So now we're able to create a swatch library. Now that's going to go in the swatches panel and that's fine for you finding it, it's not a really good idea for trying to find it to share with others. What I've got is Memphis design pattern, so I'm just going to call it that and click "Save", so that's safe for my own purposes. However, if I want to share it with other people, it would be easier if I put it in the right place right now, so let's go back to this menu, let's go back to save Swatch Library as AI. You can't save it as ASE, because that doesn't say patterns, so don't be tempted to do something there with ASE, doesn't work. You just going to do AI and now I'm going to put it in the place I wanted to put it, so for example, I might put it on my desktop, and I'm just going to Memphis design patterns, so I'll just click "Save". That's easy for me to then find to distribute to somebody else. Now because I trashed this document, I got rid of my swatches, I got rid of some other patterns, I may not want to save this. In fact, I don't want to save it because I want my document packed with all the swatches and things, so what I'm going to do is just close this without saving. Then I'll reopen it with File, Open Recent. Now, just be aware that some of these are the actual swatches file that you just saved, so if they open up without anything in them, just close them because they weren't the one that you wanted. You'd go to File, Open Recent files and find the one that's actually got the patterns and the patterns swatches. Still not there yet. Let me try this one, that's the one that's got all the elements in it. Just don't be horrified that you seem to have lost everything because those files are going to appear in the Open Recent files list, you need to just find the one that still has all the elements in it. Now the only other thing to deal with is the situation where you want to re-use these patterns in future. Let me just close these documents down, let's create a brand new document here in Illustrator, and we're going to find that these patterns are not in the swatches palette. In fact, the swatches palette looks exactly like it did when we started off this class. I want my Memphis patterns, so what I'm going to do is go to the fly-out menu or I could come down here to libraries. We're going to pick up user-defined, and then we're going to Memphis design patterns, and here are our two patterns. We can just click to add them to the swatches palette, and then we can create a shape. It can be any shape you like, and we can fill it with our patterns by just clicking on the pattern. That's how you actually grab those saved patterns so that you can re-use them in some other project in the future. 17. Project and Class Wrap Up: We've now completed the video portion of this course, so it's over to you. Your class project will be to create your color scheme and the objects to use in your Memphis Style Pattern, and then create your pattern and post an image of it as your class project. Now, as you were watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt asking if you would recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed this class and learned things from it, would you do two things for me? Firstly, answer yes, that you do recommend this class, and secondly, write even just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they might enjoy and learn from. Now if you see the follow link on the screen, click it and you'll be notified when my new classes are released. If you'd like to leave me a comment or a question, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look out and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. I hope you enjoyed this course and that you learned a lot about creating Memphis design objects and patterns in Illustrator. I'll look forward to seeing you in yet another graphic design for lunch course here on Skillshare in the future.