The Professional Repeat: A Surface Designer's Guide to Print Production

1. About This Class: Have you ever wondered how you go from a digital art file to a finished product? Well, you're in the right place because that's what this class is all about. Hi, I'm Chris Ruff, and I've been a surface designer for more than a decade. And before that, I was a graphic designer. So I've had all kinds of print production experiences. Print production is such an important topic for surface designers, but it's one that's often overlooked in classes. And I've never found a place where it's comprehensively covered. So we're just kind of left to figure things out as we go along. A number of years ago, I finally got a meeting with one of my dream clients, and they chose one of my designs. They agreed to my price as long as I could provide them with an indexed file. Of course, I said, Sure, no problem. But I didn't have any idea what an index file was. So that's one of the reasons for this class. I want to share all of the production knowledge that I've learned throughout the years and share it with you so you don't have to bluff your way through a meeting like that. Now, some of the things in this class will be specific to either Photoshop or Illustrator, but there's also all kinds of other information that applies no matter how you make your art. I'll be showing you things like how to recognize and fix pattern design flaws, how to work with tints, how to set up production files for rotary printing and wallpaper, and working with CMYK versus RGB versus Panton colors. I'll also be taking you on some virtual tours of printing facilities, so you can see firsthand how products are printed using offset printing, rotary printing, screen printing, digital printing and pad printing. At the end of the class, I'll share with you how you can get a free copy of my print production glossary. It has over 100 definitions for print production terms. In addition to the free glossary, I also offer a premium guide that's packed with all the information you're about to learn in this class. That way, you'll have easy access to it once the class is finished. It's a 58 page fully illustrated digital guide. It's got an interactive table of contents that really makes all production information just a click away. There are also links back to this class in case you ever want to revisit any of the videos down the road. Together, the class and the Companion Guide makes a powerful resource for every production situation you run into. It's all just right here. The guide is available right here on Skill Share if you go to my profile page or just search for professional repeat in the Skill Share search bar. Okay, let's dive into the lessons. 2. Print Production Overview: Let's start with a quick overview of the whole print production process. It starts with the artwork. Yeah, that's the fun part. But once the art is sold or licensed to a company, then the next step is for you to create a production file, and that just contains the technical information about the artwork that the client will need. That production file goes to the client. The client will give that production file to the production team who will create a CAD drawing, which is sometimes also referred to as a pitch sheet. That just contains additional information about the product, the scale of the art, the placement of it on the product, the materials, in this case, if it's a cotton shirt or a silk shirt and details like the buttons and how the cuffs are sewn, that thing. That is the file that goes to the factory. The factory will then make proofs to show the client. If there's fabric involved in this case, with this shirt, they'll send first swatches of the printed fabric, and that's called a strike off. Then after that, they'll actually ship a sample of the finished product so that the client can check the quality and the manufacturing techniques and that kind of thing. Once the client gives their final approval, then production can begin and the finished products are created. That's how the whole process works. 3. Checking for Pattern Design Flaws: The first step to creating a truly professional repeat is to make sure that there are no design flaws in the pattern. Holes, rivers, unintentional stripes, and slopes are some of the most common flaws that can sneak their way into your repeats. Let's go through them in this lesson. Here are four variations of pattern and three of them have the issues that I just mentioned, but you'd never know it by looking at just these small swatches. It's important to look at a larger area of the pattern. Now you can start to see them. This one on the left has holes in it, the white areas that look out of place in an otherwise densely packed floral design. Let's look at some other examples of holes. In this one, the small swatch looks fine, but in the larger area, we can see the holes here and here. Similar story with this one, the swatch looks fine, but there's an empty spot of black right in here. A good trick is to squint your eyes when you look at it. That seems to help the holes pop out. This one would be easy to fix by just moving this red flower down a little bit to fill the space better. So now let's go back to our floral variations. This one suffers from rivers and rivers show up in the negative spaces and look like rivers on a map, meandering their way through the print. This isn't an egregious example of rivers and would probably be acceptable for something like a peril where the flow of the fabric would really minimize the river. But I like to use the wallpaper test. Imagine if this was wallpaper in your office where you would see it every day for hours at a time. You would definitely notice those rivers and your eyes would have a tendency to wander down those rivers endlessly, and that would definitely get old. Let's look at a couple other examples of rivers. Now here, the rivers are super obvious. It's that blue line that makes its way from top to bottom on the print. Sometimes they're not so obvious. This one, they're broken up, so you can see them right through here. Holes and rivers are pretty easy to fix once you see them. It's just a matter of moving the motifs around a little bit until those gaps disappear. Holes and rivers are bad, but it doesn't mean that you need to fill up every square inch of your pattern. Like this pattern is just fine because it was intentionally designed to be open and airy and the white spaces are carefully balanced throughout the print. The biggest difference is that holes and rivers are mistakes. In this print, if some of the white areas were significantly bigger in some areas than others like this, those would look like holes and need to be adjusted. The third one here is a good example of unintentional stripes. That happens when some of the motifs line up in a way that creates stripes unintentionally. In this case, the darkest leaf forms happen to fall along a vertical line to cause a stripe, there's actually a horizontal stripe happening here, but it's really caused by a river, so the negative space in the design. Let me show you a couple other examples of unintentional stripes. This pattern is a good example. It's a simple design with some randomly placed trees. But as I start to zoom out, Now they become apparent here and here, and they become more clear as we go smaller. If I put a black background, you can even see a more. See how much they stand out. As I look at it, there's also a problem with a hole throughout this pattern. You can also see a horizontal stripe coming right through here and actually a river going down here. This pattern has lots of problems, and again, it just takes moving them around a little bit until you can make those flaws go away. Here's another good example. It just looks like a random place leaves, and here is the repeat. But as we zoom out, you start to see the stripes. There's a horizontal stripe here and a vertical thing going on here. I wanted to point out that when you're doing all over random design like this, especially with leaves, I tend to point to each other. Like this leaf points to this one, points to this one, especially if they are almost perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, those tend to make stripes for you. Be aware of that. Care this one to a fixed version has a much nicer all over feel to it. Okay. If you've taken any of my repeat pattern classes, you know, I'm a big fan of the Illustrator's pattern tool. I start nearly all of my patterns with the pattern tool. Mostly because I can just take a group of motifs like this one, select them, and just go to object pattern make. I can start to see those flaws that we talked about right at the start. Right away, I can see I've got a horizontal stripe happening here and a vertical stripe happening here. The other advantage of the pattern tool is that I can instantly change from a grid repeat, which is also called a straight repeat to one of these other options. There's a brick by row and a brick by column, which is also known as a half drop repeat. Pro tip, creating half drop or brick repeats, instead of just a straight grid repeat is one of the best ways to make your repeats look more professional because they just improve the flow and rhythm of the pattern. Let's try a half drop repeat. See how that instantly got rid of the horizontal stripe, then it's just a matter of moving things around. I can instantly start to see how that affects the overall flow of the pattern. Here's the finished pattern as a half drop repeat and compare it to a straight repeat. They look similar, but at a reduced scale, you can see the difference in the flow. Straight repeats always feel more stack because the tiles are aligned vertically and horizontally. Whereas in the other two, the tiles are offset either vertically or horizontally, and that gives the effect of creating more, more energy, and more movement through the pattern. That's why I always recommend trying out a half drop or a bric repeat. So this last one is where I've fixed all of those problems. There are no more holes, there's no rivers or unintentional stripes. It just generally has a good flow and the white space is even and balanced. So it passes the wallpaper test. There's one more common design flaw to cover and that's slopes. A slope is an optical illusion that makes the pattern feel like it is not on level, like it's moving uphill or downhill, and it's easier to see in a larger area. Can you see it? This pattern looks like it's going slightly uphill in this direction. It's not really. If you look at this mushroom down here, it's in the exact same position all the way along the bottom. It isn't sloping, it's just an optical illusion. If you're not sure whether you have a slope or not, try flipping the pattern the other direction and see if it goes the other direction. Now it appears that the design is going downhill. What's going on here? And how do you fix it? Well, it has to do with the way the individual motifs are drawn. If we make a straight line and bring it in here and look at the bottom of this little plant, you can see it's not level. If we look at this little bear, his feet aren't quite level either. And vertically, the same thing is happening. On the bear, if we go right down the center of his nose, he's not symmetrical here. Having all those motifs, just slightly off kilter is what makes our eye think it's going up hill. The way to fix it is not to rotate everything, but to rotate individual motifs so they feel more like they're on solid ground. Let's take our little rulers and put them on this little plant here. Then I'm just going to take this little plant and draw it, it's more even with the horizontal and this part of it will rotate. It's more vertical and rotate him and do the same for the little bear. We'll rotate this guy and this one. Now, we don't need to individually rotate every motive here, but if we just do the biggest ones and the most noticeable ones, then we should be okay. Here is where we were before and after. This was a pretty straightforward slope problem. It was pretty easy to identify what was happening with it, but sometimes it can be more challenging to figure out. Take this example, for instance. I made this motif and made a repeat out of it. Then I filled a shape with it and I thought it was okay and I wondered what it would look like if I rotated these 45 degrees. I like that better until I scaled it. And discovered it had a slope. Can you see it there? Looks like it's a little bit off kilter, it looks like it's going up hill. I thought maybe if I just rotated the motif that that would counteract the slope. But unfortunately, that didn't have much of effect. As I looked at it, it seemed like this almost horizontal shape here was what was maybe causing that to happen. Also, the vertical line seemed a little bit out of place as well. I copied the motif into a new file to just give me a little bit room to play. Then I added some little quadrants to see if I could line things up a little bit better so it wouldn't be so askew and added some diagonal guidelines as well. It took me a lot of iterations here to figure out what is causing this slope. Here's what I did. I redrew this one and this one. I made this one, a little bit smaller over here. After a lot of trial and error, I was able to fix it. Here's where we were with the upward slope, and here's the final one. It all looks a little bit more balanced and doesn't have that sense of vertigo that the first one did. Now you should feel better equipped to critique your repeats and identify and fix all of these design flaws. In the next lesson, I'll show you a good technique for finding technical flaws. 4. Virtual Tour 1: Offset Printing: Now, let's take a little break and go on our first virtual print tour. Offset printing is also called offset lithography, and it's used for printing on paper. Probably all the newspapers and magazines that you've ever read were printed with offset lithography. In surface design, you'll find it being used for greeting cards or stationary, gift wrapped, anything that needs to be printed on paper. To print an image like this photo, first, the image is mechanically separated into four standard process colors. Those are cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Then a plate is made from each of those color separations. It's not really a plate. It's actually a thin, flexible metal sheet. The inside of an offset press is complex with lots of rolling cylinders. That flexible plate with the color separation on it is wrapped around one of those cylinders inside the press. The blue roller at the top here is the ink roller and it applies ink to the plate. Then instead of the plate pressing directly onto paper, it's first offset to what's called a blanket cylinder. It's not really a blanket, it's actually made of rubber. As the paper moves into the press, it's pressed up against that blanket cylinder and picks up the ink. Now, it seems like an extra step to have that blanket cylinder, but I guess it improves the detail of the image. That's also where it gets its name because the image is offset to the blanket roller before it's pressed onto the paper. This is what an offset press looks like. This one is like the size of a room, but they can also be much smaller. All those cylinders that we were just talking about are all housed in their own units. You can see the units here, there's five of them. They're the taller, upright areas of the press. The ink is loaded at the top of each unit and each unit gets its own color. A stack of papers is loaded at the front end. And then this cool little section thing picks up each individual sheet and moves it into the press. Here you can see how fast the cylinder spin and how noisy they are. Then at the other end of the press, the printed sheets come out one by one and are collected into a tidy stack. The tell tell characteristic of something printed on an offset press is if you look closely with a magnifier, you'll see the images made up of tiny dots in differing sizes. All the colors in an image are made up from just the combination of those four different process colors. The green at the bottom here is the result of yellow dots being printed over can dots and they end up looking green. When you look at it from a distance, the dots disappear and it looks like a regular photo. That's offset printing. 5. Checking Patterns for Technical Issues: Have you ever sent a file out to a client only to find out that the repeat wasn't perfect, the client has to come back to you and ask you to make corrections to the repeat? Well, it's happened to me, and I just hate it. It feels so unprofessional. Now I always double check to make sure the repeat is perfect before sending it to the client. Let me show you the quick technique that I use. I'm going to grab the circle tool and I'm going to make a circle in the upper left corner. It doesn't matter how big it is just so that it crosses the corner of the repeat. Then I'm going to make it a bright, noticeable color that's not in the repeat. Then I'm going to take all that and put it in my swatches panel. Now I'm going to go over here and make a big reptile and fill it with that pattern. The reason for this marker is so that I can see where the pattern repeat is. Any problem with this repeat will fall along this line or this line. It helps to add some guides there, and I'll need my rulers open to do that, which is command R. Then I'll grab a guide and pull it down here. I'm not going to put it right on the line of the marker because I want to be able to see that edge better. I'm just going to put it offset there and grab another one from the side and put it right there. Now I'm going to zoom in and check the repeat. I go along this line, and right away, I can see a problem here. When I changed the colors, I didn't change it on both sides of the repeat, and then look over here, somehow I accidentally bumped this motif. Let's go down here. Here's another place where I goofed. Then once I get back down to that marker, I know that I've checked all of the vertical edge as well as all the horizontal. Now I can make a mental note of where those are, so I need to fix this and this and this. And I can go back to my repeat and find those places. Like here, and this need to match. I'm going to take this one, use my eye dropper tool, which is just on the keyboard, pick up that color and change it here. And then this was in the wrong place. Let's take that motif out. I'll move this one. I'll right click, go to transform, move, and I want to move at zero and -3.1 407 and copy it. Let's see, there was one other place. It was this and this. I'm going to take that leaf, use the eye dropper and pick up that color. Now we should be good, but I always check it again. Let's bring it over, fill it with the corrected one. Now that looks fine along here, that lines up correctly, and I can go down this side, and everything looks good there. Now I'm really confident that my pattern is perfect. I'll just go over, get rid of the marker, and add it back in. That's a good thing to do anytime you send out a file. 6. Color Systems: Okay. In this lesson, we're going to get into the nitty gritty of different color systems. I'm going to walk you through CMYK, Pantone, RGB and hex colors. There's also something called index colors, but we'll wait until a later lesson when we're talking about photoshop to cover that one. So we'll start with CMYK colors. We've already touched on those in the offset lesson, but CMYK stands for cyan, magenta, yellow and black. These are ink colors, mixing them together just like paints, you get a rainbow of colors. Sometimes they're also referred to as process colors, and they're primarily used for offset printing and digital printing. Next, there's panton colors. Panton is a brand name for a set of colors that are used for printing on paper and all kinds of other surfaces, and they're used almost universally throughout the world. That means if you use a panton color to spec a red ink in your art file, you can feel confident that the factory on the other side of the world in China will print the red that you're expecting because they'll have the panton formulas to make that particular red ink. Before I became a surface designer, I was a graphic designer. To me, pantone meant these guides right here because they're the ones that you use when printing on paper. The numbers are either a three digit or a four digit numbered, followed by a C, which stands for coated or shiny paper or a U for uncoated paper. In other words, a dull paper. Little did I know that there's a whole other pantone world, and that's pantone fashion home and interiors, also known as F HI. If you're printing on any other surface besides paper, these are the colors you should use. The numbers look a little different. They start with two digits that indicate the lightness or the darkness of the color, and then four digits after the hyphen that indicates the hue or what the color is. Then it's followed by TPX or TPG. Supposedly, TPG is newer and the TPX suffix is no longer used. But I've had many clients who still use it. Don't worry too much about that. They're really basically the same. Next up is RGB colors, which stands for red, green, and blue. It's the color system for light like the light coming through your computer screen. Since I've always worked with pigment colors, where the primary colors are red, yellow, and blue, and mixing them all together creates black, I always have a hard time wrapping my brain around RGB because the primary colors are red, green, and blue. It especially boggles my mind when I think that combining them all, instead of getting black, you get white. It does make total sense because with light, black is the absence of any light. Adding more light makes more colors visible until you have pure white light that includes all the colors in the spectrum. Another place you can find RGB colors is your TV screen. If you zoom way in, you'll see red, green, and blue pixels, which are the building blocks for every color on the screen, much like the halftone dots in offset printing that we looked at earlier. Okay. The question comes up, should you work in RGB or CMYK. I personally always work in CMYK for two reasons. One, I'm just more comfortable mixing those colors, which is probably the case for a lot of artists who have ever used paint. The other reason that I work in CMYK colors instead of RGB is because of gamut. Gamut is the range of colors that a particular color system can display. Here's the whole spectrum of visible light. Here are the colors in RGB gamut. It's a subset of visible light. Here's the gamut for Panton colors and finally, the gamut for CMYK colors. You can see that there are more RGB colors than there are CMYK. It might sound like a good idea to use the broadest gamut of colors that you can. But the problem is, if you design something with all on bright lime greens and magentas, there's a good chance that you won't be able to reproduce it like that on anything in the real world. Sometimes that conversion from RGB to CMYK can really be pretty disappointing. I just lose the brilliance of the colors. That's why I choose to use CMYK inks because I know if I create something in CMYK, when it comes time for production, I'll be able to reproduce, what's on my screen. Now I can hear what you're saying. You're saying, Hey, but what about spoonflower? The request that you send RGB files. That's true. But their inkjet printers do use CMYK colors, and they just ask for RGB colors so that they can convert them once they get them using their own conversion formula. That helps them with color consistency. Okay. Let's move on to the last color system, hex codes. It's probably the least familiar to a lot of you. But if you look at the color picker in photoshop, this number here made up of letters and numbers is a hex code. You'll also find it in Illustrator's color palette right here. Hex codes are directly related to RGB colors. In fact, this six digit number is really three pairs of numbers. The first pair is the red value. The second pair indicates the green value, and the third is the blue value. So why the letters and numbers? Well, I can only guess there was a total math geek involved. Let me take a minute to explain. Obviously, you know how to count, and if you start at zero and get up to nine, the next number would be ten, except here. Instead, the next number is zero A, then zero B, zero. Then when you get to zero, the next number is ten. Weird That pattern continues and when we get to nine F, it switches to a zero, then b zero. Until the very last number on this whole sequence is FF. Now, don't worry, this material won't be on the final. I just thought it might be helpful for you to know that there's some sense of order to hex codes. Now, since RGB is based on light, zero is the darkest value like no light, and F is the lightest. If you had a value that's all zeros, that would be black, all Fs, that would be white. I don't think hex codes are used all that commonly in surface design. But if you need them, for instance, if a client asks you to use a particular hex color, then you can just type the code into the color picker in either photoshop or illustrator, and then add it to your swatches panel. Okay. 7. Virtual Tour 2: Digital Printing: Our next virtual tour takes us inside digital printing, which is a relative newcomer to the printing world. One you're probably most intimately acquainted with thanks to your deskcp printer? There are two types of digital printers. There's the laser printer and that uses the toner cartridges that are filled with a color powder, and then there's inkjet printers, which uses transparent inks that are just sprayed onto the paper, tiny tiny little sprays. What do desktop printers have to do with surface design? Will many of you probably already use spoonflower or other digital print on demand services? They all use digital printers that are basically gigantic inkjet printers. In fact, this is a video of spoon flowers operation. You can see the printing head underneath the plastic shield printing little tiny portions of the fabric as it goes. The fabric as it comes out, goes directly into a heating unit to make sure that the ink is dry. There's one other type of digital printing that you may have heard of and that's clay printing. It's just a high end version of inkjet printing. It's often used for printing art prints because they use special fade resistant inks, archival paper, and it's able to capture very fine details with great color accuracy. 8. Exporting Illustrator Files: Now that you've checked and corrected any design flaws, you're ready to send a file to the client. If you're working an illustrator, you have two options. You can send out the illustrator file, or you can export a pattern tile as a JPEG or a PNG file. Exporting that file is what we're going to talk about first. Here's my pattern. When I go into wireframe mode, you can see the pattern and the bounding box as well as this larger rectangle, and that's my background color. Now, it's important that that background box extends beyond the bounding box because that's the best way to avoid little white hair lines that can sometimes show up between your pattern tiles when you're exporting to JPEG or PNG files. Let me walk you through my process, and it's really pretty simple. Basically, select the bounding box, and now go up to object artboards fit to selected art. Now remember, our selected art was our bounding box. What happens now is our artboard is exactly the same size as our tile as our repeat tile, and that's what we want. Now, all we need to do is go to file export port. We can name it up here. You can pick either a PNG file or a JPEG file, and probably that's something you'd want to ask your client which one they prefer. Let's just pick JPEG in this case. One of the most important things that you need to do is check right down here to say Use Artboards. That's what's going to crop exactly to our bounding box. Then click Export. Then you can choose the color model, and that really depends on the end use for the file, and something you might want to ask your client which one they prefer. Let's just say we're doing it for spoonflower and I know they like RGB, so we'll pick that. You can always keep the quality at maximum. Don't worry about the compression method, and the resolution depends on the use. If you don't know how it's going to be used, always save it on at least 300 DPI or PPI. And then this one is very important. Make sure it's set on art optimized. And then just click Okay. Once you've made that JPEG, it's always a good idea to open it up and check it. Here's my file. What I want to do is to zoom in and check the edges. What I'm looking for is to make sure that this last row of pixels is exactly the same color as the next row in. If you're going to have any white hair lines, you would see a lighter area all along one edge. Okay. For comparison, here's an example of a pattern that does have white hair line problems so you can see the difference. See as I scroll along down here, the last row of pixels is a lighter color than the next row in. And that is our infamous white hair line. Once you've gone all the way around the tile and you don't see any issues, then you can be pretty darn sure that you're not going to have any white hair line trouble when you output. In the next lesson, I'll show you the basic setup for an illustrator file for production. 9. Creating Illustrator Production Files: In the last lesson, I showed you how to export an illustrator file. But some clients prefer to get the actual illustrator file because vector files are a lot more flexible when it comes to scaling and tweaking things in the production process. Now, there is no correct way to set up an illustrator file for production. But the most important thing is to think about the person that's going to be receiving the file and make their job as easy as possible. So with that in mind, here's how I set up my production files. First, I drag the pattern swatch out of the swatches panel and put it over here on the left. Then I select the bounding box and give it a stroke, just any color that's going to stand out from the pattern so that they can clearly see where the edges of the tile are. I want to note again that I always make the background color rectangle larger than the bounding box so that it extends beyond the bounding box just like all the other motifs in the pattern. Now, I create a larger rectangle over here and fill it with the pattern. Then I label the tile and the sample rectangle and add swatches for all the colors in the pattern in a line down here. You don't need to label the color swatches unless they are panton spot colors. Then I add the title of the art and any identifying number that I might have and put my logo, web address, and copyright notice in the bottom right. I also add a line that says, A artwork changes must be approved by the artist. They understand that they are not allowed to make any changes. Now, honestly, they don't always follow this, but I do think it helps to make clear what my expectations are. I should also note that if I've sold the artwork to the buyer out right, including the copyright, then I no longer have any say what the buyer does with it. I leave that line out as well as the copyright notice because I no longer own the copyright. Now it's all set, but there's one other thing I do and that is, I make sure that there are no other versions of the pattern in the swatches panel. Like right here, I've got a number of them and I don't want there to be any possibility that they use the wrong one. I go up to these three little lines here and say, select all unused. Now that selects everything that's not being used on this page. Then click the little trash can and delete them. Lastly, I always go to show A. Just in case there's anything in there that I've forgotten about, and so I can delete that. When I save this file, I always add my name to the title. Just in case they've got 100 art files on their computer, it's very clear which ones came from me. That's the basic layout that I use for repeat patterns, and I'll be showing you some other tips in a later lesson to help you make sure that your repeat pattern files look as professional as possible. But right now, let's look at setting up a non pattern production file, since not everything you do as a surface designer involves patterns. Here's a postcard I want to get printed for a trade show. It's eight by 11 ", and that's what size my artboard is. Now I want my patterns to go right up to the edges of the postcard, but most presses can't do that, they'll end up printing it on a larger size sheet and then trim it down. But the trimmers aren't perfectly accurate. We need to give a little margin of error around the design and that's called a bleed. I can go into file document setup to set up a bleed right here. Usually printers request one eighth of an inch, which is 0.125, and then click. Now, this red line is the bleed line, and we just need to extend the patterns to that edge so that they bleed off the page. I'll do that with my direct selection tool and I'll click along one side and drag it to that bleed mark while holding the shift key down so that it constrains it to just moving left and right. I'll do that with each pattern and this banner. So that they all bleed out one eighth of an inch. That's really all that's required for this to be printed. But there's two other things I like to do. First, I always expand the type because if they don't have this font loaded in their system, there's a chance that it could default to some other font. I certainly don't want that. I just select it and go to type, create outlines. Now, the letters are shapes instead of a font, so there's no way that it can change. I'll do a similar thing for the patterns. Right now, they are pattern fills, but I'd hate there to be any hiccups with a pattern fill. I'm going to expand it by going to object expand. Then just make sure that fill is checked. Now, just like the type, it's been turned into shapes. There's no way that the field could get changed. Now it's messy right now. There's one more step and that's to go to pathfinder and choose merge. If you don't see pathfinder, go to window Pathfinder and it's down here. Now it looks a lot simpler. I'll do the same thing for the other patterns. I select one, go to object, expand. And then click Merge. Once that's done for all of them, this file is ready to be printed. Now, you could send out this illustrator file, but often printers ask for a PDF instead. Actually, I'd prefer to send a PDF. We'll go to file, save a copy, and I'm saving a copy so that I can retain that other one that still has the fonts and the pattern fills in it, and then choose Adobe PDF and save. At the top here, choose press quality. That means it'll be ready for printing. Then over here on the left, click Marks and Bleeds. Now, you really only need to check trim marks, but it's fine to choose all printer marks if you want to. For the bleeds, since we already set them up in the document settings, just click here, and then save PDF. Here's what it looks like. These little lines are trim marks, and they tell the printer where to cut it. If you drew a line between all of those trim marks, it would be 8 " by 11 ", which is the finished size. These little marks are registration marks, and they help the press operator line up each printing plate so that the colors line up perfectly. The color barars here help them monitor the density of the inks as the job is running. Both registration marks and color bars aren't necessary for digital printing. That's it. That's how you set up a file for offset or digital printing. 10. Virtual Tour 3: Screen Printing: Now it's time for another virtual tour. This time to explore screen printing, which is also known as silk screen. In its most basic form, it's just a wooden frame that you put a very fine mesh across the bottom of it. In this case, a stencil is being taped to the bottom of it, and then as you put ink on it and pull that ink across the screen with a squeege it will only pass through to the paper where there's holes in the stencil. Then that process would be repeated for each color. T shirts are commonly screen printed and the process is the same. Here, the frame is set down over the gray T shirt. Ink is pulled across the screen. Although the difference here is instead of a stencil, this time, there's a photosensitive emulsion that's applied to the screen beforehand, and that creates the artwork, the holes in the screen. As it's lifted up, here's the final result. For larger t shirt quantities, there is an automatic screen printer. The process is the same. The t shirts rotate underneath the screens, which drop down, squeegee goes across and delivers the ink, the squeegee comes up and there's another blade that spreads the back across ready for the next. Then the t shirt passes to the next color and the same thing happens each screen will have its own version of the artwork, like when we color separated the image in offset printing. The process continues until you have your final result. You can also screen print bolts of fabric. Here's a really large press that's printing a plaid design onto red fabric. Now, presses like this can print ten to 12 colors at a time. Although this one only has three colors. As we go down towards the end of the press, you can see there's first the blue ink going down. Okay. And then the fabric advances to the next screen where a lighter blue gets printed on, and I'm just amazed at all the excess ink here. Like how did they keep it from slopping onto the fabric? But obviously they know what they're doing. Anyway, next, it gets the white ink. Then it gets a little bit of a chance to dry as it goes down the belt, and you can see as it's being pulled off that the belt is actually so that the fabric will stay in place during the printing. That's how screen printed fabrics get made. 11. Pantone vs Adobe: Clash of the Titans: Let's talk about using pantone colors in illustrator. It used to be simple and straightforward because pantone libraries were actually built right into Adobe software. But in 2022, Pantone and Adobe had a little bit of a spat over the licensing agreement Adobe had with Panton and they ended up splitting up. Now, neither side is talking about what happened, but no doubt money was involved, but the follow outt is really impacting all of us creative people. Adobe removed pantone libraries from their products and Pantone created a monstrosity called Pantone Connect that you can download and use as an extension in Adobe products. There's two problems with it. First, it's a subscription based app and they want $15 a month, which seems way too much. From everything I've read, it's really a terrible clunky application to use. What do we do now? What do you do if you need panton colors, but don't want to pay monthly for them? Well, there are some workarounds that designers are now using. One option is something called free tone, which is a panton look alike library of colors created specifically to help artists avoid having to pay for pantone colors since they used to be free? I'll include the link to free tone in the class description. The only bummer is it doesn't include a version of Pantones fashion and home colors in it. Another option some people are doing is to download an older version of Illustrator from Creative Cloud, and then they extract the Pantone color libraries from it. If you want to do this, go to Creative Cloud and look for Illustrator 2651 because it's the most recent version that still had Panton libraries in it. Unfortunately, this won't get you the fashion and home libraries either. The only way I've found to get those free so far is at this website. Now, I can't guarantee 100% that downloading from this website is safe, but it looks pretty legit to me and I haven't had any problems since I downloaded them from here. What you do is go in there and you don't have to make an account or anything. Just search for Pantone, then you'll find a list and look for autocrt because they have all the libraries. Click on that listing and then click on the library that you want to download and go up here to this spot and click download. Now, once you get it on your computer, it's not really that important where you store them, but maybe put it in your applications folder so you know where to look for them. Mull over all those options and decide what you want to do. Or hopefully by the time you're taking this class, the problem will be solved and Adobe will once again embed right within the software. But as of 2024, that still hasn't happened. Once you get your libraries, you're ready for the next lesson, and I promise you it's easier to use them than to acquire them. 12. Using Pantone Colors in Illustrator: For this lesson, we're going to go back to this pattern which right now is set up with CMYK colors, and I'm going to show you how to turn those into pantone colors. Now, if you haven't watched the previous lesson, make sure to do that first before you do this lesson. If you haven't already done so, the first step is to load those pantone libraries into Illustrator. To do that, go up here, click the three little lines, go down to Open Swatch Library. And then all the way at the bottom, it says, O library. This is where it used to be that this is where the pantone colors were, but they're not listed anymore. We have to go all the way down to other library. Just go to the place that you put your library. Or if you don't remember, you can just search for AC and a bunch will come up and you can go down to Pantone. Now I've got a bunch of them that are still loaded here, but let's pick one. Let's do the pant FHI color guide. That's the fashion in home. I'll click on that and open. So all of the colors are shown here. And one thing to note, if you're working with this, I find it easier to set these up as large thumbnails. That way, I could just see them a little bit better as I'm working. We're just going to make that small for now. Next, we'll select our repeat tile, and the color swatches, and we're going to make a color group out of them. Click the little icon over here that looks like a folder. When this pops up, make sure that selected artwork is chosen and this one. Convert process to global. Process is process colors, that's CMYK, and global is the way that illustrator means spot colors, and Pantones are spot colors. You can name it if you want. I'm just going to leave it. Click Okay. Now our little swatches have gotten this little triangle on the corner, and that means it's a spot color. Now, with your swatches and repeat tile still selected, choose that color group. Now they're all highlighted, and click on this icon, which opens the recolor tool. Now, this looks really complicated. I know, but what we're going to do is so simple. All we need to do is click down here where it says none right now. Click on that and go down to the very bottom and your panton color guide should be listed down there. Select that. Now you can't read it, but it's going to be changed to panton colors. And then just click. Now it's made a new set of swatches and each one of them in that little tiny triangle has a dot. That means it's a pant color. If I click on one of them, you'll see it's listed up here. So Illustrator has gone in to find the closest match to our CMYK color. Now, it isn't perfect, and here's some comparisons of pantone versus CMYK, and you can see that sometimes it gets it better than others. Here's the CMYK swatches so that we can compare them. Obviously, they're very similar. But slightly different this background color. The top row is the Pantones. It made a little bit darker background. You can see here that this background is a bit darker than this one. If you want to go and see if there's a different color that you like better, that's when this comes in. You can open this up. And this color is 19 3731. Let's go find that. There it is. I'm going to select it and then get rid of this. Now I can see all the colors, and if I scroll down, there's our color. We can see what's next to it. Let's click on this and try this background. That's a little bit more red. I'm not sure I like that. T one, You can just scroll through and pick your own color if you want. I'm just going to leave it. I do think that's the closest to what I had and just move this out of the way. Then the last step is to just label these. I'm just going to take this and I'm going to type in zero zero Px. Then I'm just going to duplicate it all the way down the line. I'll click on this one, and that is 19 3731. And this one is 17392. This one is 164020, and so on. And that's it. Now there's just a couple little details to take care of. Since we change the colors, this pattern is no longer accurate. I'm going to put the revised version into the swatches panel. When I send out a file, I always make the bounding box a color so that they can clearly see where the edges of the repeat are to make the pattern, we need to make that invisible and send it to the back. Then we'll just make the pattern as usual and fill our rectangle with the new version. There it is. Okay. Okay. Now, as we did before, let's get rid of anything in here we're not using. Click up here, select all unused and put them in the trash. Now we only have our Panton colors and our pattern swatch. That's it. Now we've transferred it from CMYK colors to Panton. You can send this file out to any client that needs to have panton colors. 13. Virtual Tour 4: Rotary & Pad Printing: Now here's our final virtual tour. This time, we're going to take a look at rotary printing, which is the most common way that fabrics are printed. Then at the end, we'll also take a quick peek at pad printing. Here's what a rotary printer looks like. It has some similarities with the screen printing press that we saw in the last lesson, but here you won't see any flat screens or ink or squeeges. Instead, the screens are actually cylinders, which you can see rotating here. Each one has a different color. Here's the machine that actually etches the design all the way around the cylinder. Okay. Once that's done, the screen is washed and here you can see the holes in the screen. Rotary printing is essentially screen printing, but instead of a squeeg a device is loaded into the center of each cylindrical screen, and then ink is pumped into it and gets pushed through the screen onto the fabric as it rotates. The biggest advantage of rotary printing is just how quickly fabric can be printed. Just look how fast the fabric is coming off this machine. Would it be cool to see one of your designs coming off a machine like this? It made me chuckle to see it just piling up on the factory floor, but it doesn't go directly from floor to store. There are a couple other steps more washing and curing that happens before it gets bolted and shipped. There's one last printing method I want to introduce you to, and that's pad printing. If you've ever wondered how they can print on uneven surfaces like bowls or mugs, pad printing is one option. Here's how it works. They use a giant marshmallow. It's not a marshmallow, but it's actually a large soft piece of silicone that easily conforms to the surface of the bowl. I'll slow it down so you can see exactly what's happening. To the right, you can see a plate with blue ink on it. The squeegee goes across that plate and leaves ink only where the design is. The pad then presses down on that plate and picks up the ink. Then moves over the bowl. It presses down over the bowl. Again, because it's so soft, it conforms to the shape of the bowl and it leaves that ink behind. Isn't that cool? Here's an even better one. In this example, the pad on the left prints the outside of the bowl, then the operator flips it over and puts it on the other side where the pad comes and prints the inside. While that's happening, the, the operator loads another blank on the left side. It's like a well choreographed dance. I think it's mesmerizing and I could watch this all day. But here's another great example. This time, there's a multi colored design inside the bowl. It looks a lot like the T shirt machine that we looked at before. The pads come down, leave their ink, and the whole thing rotates, and it happens again, and when it gets to the end, the operator takes the bowl off and loads a new one. Once the printing was done, these would all be loaded into a kiln and fired just like you would any other ceramic piece. That's pad printing, and I think it's super cool. Congratulations. Now you know a whole lot about different printing methods. But how do you know which one your client will be using? Well, the simple answer is you don't, so you just need to ask them. But let me give you some general guidelines. It's always based on the substrate. In other words, what surface they're going to be printing on. If it's paper, then it could be printed with offset, screen printing or digital. Now, screen printing is not as common as the other two, but for posters and sometimes art prints and wallpaper, sometimes those are screen printed. If they're printing on fabric, and I don't just mean bolts of fabric. It could be anything from bedding to kitchen linens to apparel, anything that's made out of fabric, it will likely be screen printed, rotary printed, or digitally printed. Then the last category is everything else that could include ceramics, glassware, mugs, anything on plastic. Those would be either screen printed, they could be pad printed, digitally printed, or other. Other in this case might include using decals or embroidery, or in the case of rugs, it might be woven. That gives you a general overview. This chart is available to download in the class resources. 14. Creating Photoshop Production Files: Now let's talk about setting up production files in photoshop. If you create your repeat patterns in photoshop, sending a client a file can be as simple as just sending them a JPG file. Just make sure it's high enough resolution for whatever production process they're using. But sometimes you'll be asked to provide a layered photoshop file. What's that? Well, good question because it means different things to different companies. Sometimes it just means putting the background color on a different layer than the motifs, but sometimes it means having a separate layer for each color in the pattern, and sometimes it means having each motif grouping on its own layer. So definitely ask your client what their needs are. But sometimes I found that the client contact isn't that familiar with the production process. It might be hard to get more information from them. In that case, I suggest sending them a file like this. It just has the background color on one layer, the motifs on a second layer, and if there's a texture, put that on its own layer too, and then let them know that you can supply them a more detailed file if they should need it. I know one artist who actually sends them a couple files and clearly labels them, if you just need a flat file, use this document, if you need a layered file, use this one. That would be an option as well. Now, you could send the file just like this. But remember in illustrator, it was nice that we were able to add a title, our logo, copyright and additional info about the file. Well, there's two options to do that in Photoshop. One is I can go to file file info, and there's an opportunity to add some info that identifies the file as mine. You don't need to fill everything out here. Usually I put in my name as the creator, add my e mail address, website. Then if I scroll way down to the bottom, I add in a copyright notice. Another way you can handle photoshop files is to make the canvas a little bit bigger so you have some room to add that information right up front. Right now, if I go to image image size, my file is really big. Let's first make that little smaller. Let's make it 12 " and hit. Now I'm going to go to image Canvas size and we'll make it bigger than the 12 ". Let's make it 18 by 18. Now we have some room to put the title of the piece and add your logo and copyright notice right here. Then to make things more simple because remember, we're always trying to make things as simple as possible for the client. I'm going to take the name my copyright notice and the logo and rasterize those and merge them onto one layer. Then I'm going to put it on the bottom and call it text. Then I'm going to select the art layers and put them in their own folder called repeat tile. Now that's pretty clear. They can move the tile around if they want and they have their information right out front. It might also be helpful to add the size. This is 12 by 12. That's a nice, clean, simple, elegant way to set up your layered photoshop files. 15. Introduction to Indexed Color: In this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to indexed color, which is a technique to reduce the number of colors in an image in preparation for rotary and screen printing. Now, I use the term introduce because to do color indexing well, it takes a lot of knowledge and expertise, which is way beyond my skill level. But I can definitely show you the basic concept. Let's look at this watercolor painting. We perceive it as being blue and purple and green and maybe a couple of other colors in there. But it's actually millions of colors because of all the variations of those hues. We could get a pretty close approximation of this water color with digital or offset printing, but with rotary and screen printing, there would need to be a separate roller for each of those million colors. Obviously, that's not going to happen. We need a process to reduce the number of colors in the image. Let's walk through that process. We go up to image mode and we must first start with an RGB image. If it's CMYK, then indexed color will be graded out. Once you have your RGB color, you can just click on an indexed color. Generally, you would start with a local selective palette. That just means the computer is going to try and match the colors as best as possible. Now, 256 is the most colors that can be displayed on this screen. Right now, our indexed image looks almost exactly like the original. If you look right down in here, when I click back and forth, you'll see a subtle change there. With preview on, let's look at what happens to the image if we go down to 12 colors. Okay. There's the original and there's the index. You do lose quite a bit, and there's just no way around that. In order to print an image like this, you are going to have to make some sacrifices and some decisions about what's important. Now one thing that can help is to add a dither. If I click on this and diffusion is generally the one that's used. Click on that. Now you can see it's helped it a bit. Especially watch in this area. Here's without ditthering and here with diffusion added. If I zoom in, you'll see what's happening with the ditthering. It's adding some extra little dots in there, a stippling effect that helps to make the color transitions a little bit smoother. Here's without diffusion and with it. That's the absolute basics of a dx color where we just input a number of colors that we need and let photoshop determine the best match. Here's another example where we customize those colors a little bit more. I'll go up to mode indexed color and remembering that we need to start with an RGB image. I'll go to indexed color. If I set it to 12 colors, now it looks like this. One thing that can be done is to force some of the colors and that's right here. I'm going to do some custom stuff here. I'm going to tell it which colors photoshop has to use in this design to make it more like the original. I click on one of these spots. That opens a color picker and I'm just going to go over here and use the eye dropper and say, I want some more of this greenish gold color in here. I'll click on that and click, and now that's one of my forced colors. Now if I click k, let's preview it now. We got a little bit of that in there, but we need some more, I think. Let's unclick it again. Go back and click second spot, and let's get this darker green in here and click Okay. We're missing out on these coppery and red colors. So let's go pick one of those. And now we're getting there a little bit. Let's pick one of these other lighter coppery colors. Okay. And there's where we are now. We would just keep playing with this as we go. Here's the final result that I did. Now, again, I'm not an expert at this. Somebody that really does this for a living probably has better techniques and expertise to make this look a little bit more like the original image. There's a really quick introduction to indexed color. It's probably not something that you may ever be asked to do, but I do think it's good to just have a general idea what indexing is, if it comes up in conversation, you'll understand it and know how it will affect the production of your artwork. 16. Scaling Repeats: Sometimes you'll need to scale repeats to a particular size for production, particularly if it's going to be used for rotary fabric printing or wallpaper. We'll get to those in a minute. But first, let me show you how I scale repeats in general, both an illustrator and photoshop. A disclaimer, there are probably lots of other ways to do this, but let me just show you how I do it. In illustrator, here's my pattern, right now, it says that it's 6 " by eight and a quarter inches. Now of course, that's not actually the size of the repeat. For that, we need to select just the bounding box and then here's the actual size. Let's say we need to change the scale, so it's 10 " tall. How do we do that? First, we're going to make a clipping mass the same size as the bounding box, and then it'll be super easy to change the size. Just click on the bounding box, copy it, which is command C, and then right click and choose paste in front. Now, I always like to add a fill color just to make sure that that box is in front, which it's not right now. We'll click again and choose bring to front. Now, select the whole thing and then go to object, clipping mask make. Now we have this neat tidy tile, and then we can just change the size right here, making sure that this is clicked so that the proportions will remain the same on our tile. I'll just type in ten, and now we're all set. Then we'll just get rid of the clipping mask by using the group selection tool, clicking on that edge and delete. Now our tile looks just like it did at the beginning, but it is the correct scale. In photoshop, you can change the scale of your print by going to image image size. Here's the size right now. It's actually pretty small. You might have some trouble scaling it up. First, make sure that re sample is unchecked because now the resolution will be linked to the new size that you type in. If I want to change the height to 10 ", you can see that the resolution is going to drop to 141.2. Unfortunately, there's really nothing you can do about that. It might be tempting to just click re sample and then type in 300. It looks now like it's 300 DPI, but it doesn't really work that way. Resampling when you're enlarging something still results in a loss of image quality. Whenever you're enlarging a design, uncheck resample, or you won't be getting an accurate measure of the actual resolution. Now, there are times when you're reducing the size of a repeat that you might want to resample. Let's say you want to upload this design to spoon flower and you want the height of the repeat to be 3 ". I type in 3 " and with resample unchecked, the new resolution will be 470 DP. Let's upload that file to spoonflower. Look, the tile isn't 3 " like we wanted. It's 9.41 ". That happens because spoonflower only needs 150 DPI. It automatically blew up the size of it to make it 150 DPI. Now you can override that by typing your own value in here. Our tile was 470 DPI and photoshop. If we put that in here and click Change, now the file is the 3 " that we wanted. You can change it here or you can resample it in photoshop. To do that, click on resample, and manually type in 150 for the resolution. Now if you upload the file to Spoonflower, you won't have any surprises. I should note, however, that you'll always want to keep a photoshop file that has the image as high a resolution as you want. When you make it smaller or lower the resolution, always save that as a copy. Now that you know how to do that scaling, I'm going to show you how that fits in with setting up files for rotary printing and wallpaper. Let's say a client asks you to set up your pattern for a 640 1 millimeter screen. What exactly does that mean? It's actually referring to the circumference around the cylinder. In this case, it's 641 millimeters around that cylinder. So if we were to take that screen off the cylinder and flatten it out, it would look like this. The height of the screen would be 645 millimeters and the width would be whatever the fabric width is going to be. That's going to be variable, and we really don't need to worry about the width. The size of our repeat needs to fit this size of the screen so that as the cylinder rotates, it's perfectly seamless every time that it goes around the cylinder. Here's my pattern and I'll stretch it out to make it fit that entire cylinder. Now, the bottom of my repeat is here and it wraps all the way around and the top edge of my repeat is here. When it spins, they'll connect and look seamless. But what if you don't want to make your pattern this big, then you just need to make sure that your repeat the height of your repeat, can be equally divided by this number. Let me show you. Instead of making our repeat the full size, we could make it half the size because it'll still repeat seamlessly there. So 641 millimeters divided by two equals 320.5. We would make our repeat 320.5 millimeters tall. If we wanted it smaller than that, we can make three of them fit in there. Each of our tiles, we would make 213.6 millimeters. We can go even smaller. Now four tiles fit perfectly on the height of the 641, and so on. Basically, your tile height needs to be a multiple of the screen size. In this case, 641. Setting up a file for wallpaper is exactly the same with one important exception. With rotary printing, we only had to worry about this one measurement, and that was the height of the screen. The width didn't matter at all. But with wallpaper, we need to take into account the width of the wallpaper role because the patterns not only need to repeat top to bottom, but they also need to line up left to right. Now, there is some variation in the width of different wallpapers, but in general, at least in the United States, they tend to be 27 ", which is 690 millimeters. We can start by figuring out the height just like we did last time. But in addition to that, our repeat needs to be a multiple of this number as well. We need to have an equal number of them going left to right. The length of our tile needs to be a multiple of the screen size. But now our width also needs to be divisible by the width of the roll. Now that can get tricky and this one actually worked up pretty well without major modifications to it. But you may find that you need to change your actual repeat, either make it wider or taller, whatever you need to do and move motifs around in order to make it fit both of those dimensions. 17. Print Production FAQs: Now let's go over a few frequently ask production questions. We'll cover things like using strokes or transparency in your illustrator files, working with tints and color accuracy, plus a few more things thrown in. First up, is it okay for illustrator motifs to have strokes in production files? The short answer is no, I wouldn't recommend it. Let me show you why. Here's two identical flowers. This one on the right, we're going to expand that stroke, and we can do that by either going to object expand in this case, the field doesn't matter, but just make sure that the stroke is checked as well. Or we can go to object path outline stroke. Both of these will do the same thing. Now if we look in wireframe mode, you can see that there's a difference. Instead of a single shape with a stroke, we have two shapes. One is the black outline and one is the red shape. Why is this important? Well, your client may need to scale your designs, and when they do that, as long as scale strokes and effects is checked, you're golden. It won't be a problem. When you scale the design up or down, the flowers will continue to look identical. But if it's not checked, watch what happens to the flower with a stroke. The stroke isn't scaling, so it appears to get thicker and thicker as the flower gets smaller. The opposite, it gets thinner and thinner as the flower is enlarged. That's why you should always expand your strokes on production files to prevent this problem from ever happening. Next up is how to prepare illustrator files that contain transparency. Transparency isn't a problem for digital or offset printing. But for printing with spot colors, the transparency will first need to be flattened. Here's an example where we have three transparent shapes. This one is set to 80% opacity. This one to soft light, and this one is set to multiply. To flatten the transparency, we need to select all of them together and go to object flatten transparency. There's a number of settings, and the top one is the most important here. It has to do with whether you want to rasterize any of the elements, and we do not. Move this to 100, so everything remains a vector. Now because everything is a vector, these two settings don't apply. Don't worry about resolution. In fact, you can ignore all of these settings with the exception of convert all strokes to outlines if there's a stroke in your art, which we do have. I'll check that and click Okay. Okay. Now it doesn't look any different. But if we move any of these shapes, you'll see that every single overlapping area is now it's separate color and its own shape, and there's no transparency left in the file. Cool, The downside with transparency is our design went from four colors to now, it's actually 11 colors because each of those areas is a different color. 11 colors might be beyond some clients limits. Always use transparency with caution unless you only plan to print digitally or with CMYK colors. Next, can I use tint of pantone colors in my production files. Let's first define what a tint is. Here's a black square, and specifically, it's a 100% black square. A tint is simply a lighter version of a color, so we could make this 80% black. Tints are expressed as a percentage of a color. In digital and offset printing, tints are created with half tone dots. If we zoomed in, the size and spacing of the dots creates the illusion of a lighter color. You can make tints of panton colors to, for digital and offset printing, if you wanted to print like all four of these tints, it would be considered just a one color printing job. But unfortunately, screen printing and rotary printing can't use half tones. Each tint would have to be specked as a separate panton color. If you wanted to print all four of these tints, it would be a four color job. Can you use tints in a production file? Yes, for digital and offset printing, no for everything else. One of the most common questions that I get about creating repeat patterns is, what size should you make your repeats? Well, if you're working an illustrator, the answer is easy, you can make a many size you want. Because it's a vector file, it can be enlarged or reduced endlessly with no concern for loss of image quality. If you work in photoshop or procreate, the answer is a little more complicated. Because with raster programs, it's always a balance between resolution and file size. Working with a giant file can be really frustrating because they tend to bog down the speed of your computer, making it nearly impossible to work with them. But if the file is too small, you risk not being able to use the art at a larger scale because there just isn't enough resolution. Think really carefully about what your art is appropriate for. If you think you're going to be working with bedding or wallpaper where you need larger scale motifs, you're going to have to work as big as you can. Now, one option would be to create your motifs at quite a large scale and then make a low res copy of each of those motifs. Then you can use the low res versions as you create your repeat, moving things around as you need, and then at the end, swap back in those high resolution versions. Then that saves you from having to move around high res images in your pattern making. But if your goal is really things like quilting fabric or kitchen linens, things like that don't need very big motifs. Even an inch or two size of your motifs might be just fine. Another thing to keep in mind is that not all applications require artwork that's at 300 DPI. For example, spoon flower only requires 150 DPI. If you create a four inch flower at 300 DPI for spoon flour, it really could be used at 8 " because they only need 150 DPI. If you're working with really large size images like a mural or a billboard, because those are meant to be seen at a distance, those don't need to be 300 DPI either. Now I know that's not a cut and dried answer, but there really isn't one in this case. As you get more experience, you'll have some better ideas how your art is going to be used and you can make better decisions about what size to start with. You might be wondering about the accuracy of panton colors, meaning if you speck a certain panton color in your file, will the finished product match that color? Well, in theory, yes. In practice, most of the time, but there can be a fair amount of variation. Let me show you a real world example. This is a floral design I created and licensed to a company that does really nice products, and here are those final products. I think they look great, but there's definitely a lot of color variation here, especially considering they were all produced with the same art file and the same pant on colors. Here's a couple of the actual colors that I speed. Here's the range of colors on the actual products. The yellow turned into orange on the place mat and the blues went from blue to purple, this coral color, they got it pretty close on the planter, but on the mat, it turned into bright red. Why does this happen? Well, there are a lot of factors involved. Substrates have a lot to do with it. This collection, the design was printed on fabric and ceramics, plastic, and aqui mat, no doubt all at different factories, maybe even different countries. Sometimes language barriers play a role. Just the fact that it's very hard to judge or proof colors on a computer screen is a problem too. In general, panton colors are pretty accurate, but there's definitely a margin of error in there that you should be aware of. Here's a good question about workflow. Should I set up production files before adding a new design to my portfolio. I suggest waiting until you license or sell the work because production files vary depending on printing methods and color systems. If you try to set them up as you go, you'll probably end up doing a lot of unnecessary work. I think your time would be better spent just creating more designs. With one exception, I think it's always a good idea to check for design flaws as you go because those are considerations, no matter what printing process is used down the road. Okay. Do you need to invest in a Panton fan book? I say invest because they're quite pricey. The fashion home version is actually over $200 right now. I have a fan book that I bought a number of years ago and I used to really depend on it. In fact, I often took the thing apart to be able to compare colors better and I was very persnickety about choosing exactly the right ones. Then reality set in and I started to understand some of those color variation issues that I talked about previously. I don't pull my fan book out of the drawer very often now. I really mostly depend on Pantones digital library and the recolor tool to convert colors to Pantone, like I showed you previously. It's just really a huge time saver to do it that way. But I am glad that I have one. They're definitely a better, more accurate and precise way to look at and choose colors than you'll ever have on a computer screen, for sure. If you have extra money or you're looking for another tax deduction, or you just like the quality of ink on paper instead of looking at things digitally, then go for it, buy a fanbook. P tip, if you do decide to buy one, don't get it at pant com. It's actually quite a bit cheaper on amazon.com. Okay. 18. Illustrator Final Checklist: In this lesson, I'm going to go over a ten point checklist that you can use to make sure that your illustrator files look professional and are ready for production. A few of these we've already gone over, but a few of them are new as well. Number one, check for design flaws, like the holes, rivers, slopes, and unintentional stripes that we talked about earlier. Number two is to check for technical flaws. You can use the marker technique that I showed you to make sure that your repeat works perfectly. Number three is to review your color swatches. Let me show you what I mean by that. This file is all set except I haven't made the color swatches yet. Let's do that first. I'm just going to make a square. I don't know how many colors are in this pattern, but it's a lot. I'm just going to duplicate this a bunch of times. Traditionally, this first swatch is the background color. I'm going to click on this and use my eye dropper tool, which is just eye on the keyboard, and then click on the background color. Now, as I go, I want to eliminate the color so that I know I've covered all of them. I'm going to take that I'm going to go to select same fill color. Then I'll go to option, hide selection, which is command three. Then I'm going to pick up each color based on dark to light in color areas. Let's click on this one, and this is a dark green. I'll use my eye dropper. Click on that and now I've got that green. We could keep doing the select select, same fill color. But I actually use this so often that I've set up my own shortcut to it. If you'd like to do that, you can go on and edit keyboard shortcuts. Then here, it's not a tool. It's a menu command that is. Click and select and then go down to same and there it is there, fill color. Here I chose Command five. You can use whatever you want. I also changed select same stroke color to command six because I use that one fairly often as well. That's how you make custom keyboard shortcuts if you want. We're back to this one, and I'm going to pick that dark green. Now I can use that shortcuts, which is command that gets me all of that green and I hide it command three. I'll do the same for this green Command five and three. This one, I'll choose this other green, and then command five to select everything, and three. Then this green. I think that's all the green. Now let's do the blues. Now we'll go to the purples. This looks like the darkest Command five, Command three. It looks like we have a couple colors left so we're going to run out of these. I'm just going to put another row of them down here. Go back to this one and we'll do the reds, that one, Command five, command three. Now I'm going to go and show all There's all our color swatches. That's 17 colors. Wow, that's a lot. That's probably more than we need. You could leave it like this if you want because if it's digital printing that you end up using this for, that's fine. It doesn't matter how many colors you have. But I'm going to see if there's a way I can just reduce it down to about 12 at this point. One of the reasons that I do this in color groups is that I can see if there's any that are incredibly similar that we can consolidate. Like these two are so close. This one, if I do Command five, it's used here, and this one, Command five, a, there's only two of those. Let's make those this other color. Have those selected, and I'll just do the eye dropper on this one, and now these two are the same. We've just gotten rid of one color. Let's see. These two blues are really similar too. Let's see that one is used, about half a dozen times. This one's just three. But I actually think that has better contrast in this. I'm going to change all of these. Command five to choose all of them, and now change them to be this color. Now we've just gotten rid of one more color. How about these blues here? Let's pick this one, Command five. Oh, look, it's just one color in there. Let's change that to this blue. Now we've gotten rid of another color. That put us down to 14 colors, and then I consolidated two more to get our final 12 colors. Now when I've manipulated the colors at all, I'd like to just do one more check to make sure I've got everything covered down here. Once again, I'll choose the first one, use Command five or select same fill color and hide it Command three, and we'll just do that with all of them. Command five, command three, Command five, command three, and so on. Now if I go into wireframe, I can see that all I have is my bounding box. I know that I have all the colors covered in my swatches, and then we will show all. That's what I mean by reviewing swatches. Number four is simplify or eliminate any unnecessary elements. This pattern is a great example of that. Looks like a really simple pattern, but if I go into wireframe mode, Okay. It's not simple at all. It's got all these extra lines in here that we don't need. Those are often a remnant of when you outline strokes, which I think is probably the case here, and there's nothing technically wrong with this pattern. It'll print just fine. But a professional file should be as simple and easy and not confusing as possible. I'm just going to clean these up a little bit. I'll just click on one of those and go over to Pathfinder and click Unite. If you don't have Pathfinder open, you can go to window and you'll find pathfinder down here. Then I'll click on this one and do the same. Just go through each of them and do that. I know that's tedious. But you can see how much simpler it's going to make the file look. This is another good example. When I look at it in wire frame, it really makes sense. There's nothing extraneous about this. But if I look at a previous iteration when I was working on it, this is what it looked like. I've got some open strokes. I've got these shapes that are crossing over here, and so it really looks confusing. It's a fairly easy fix again. If I select one, right now they're all grouped, so I'll click, group Now, this one, here it is, and I'll use Unite again, click there and nothing has changed here, but now it looks more simple. I can do the same thing with this one. It's simplify those shapes. I would do that for each of these. That takes me from this to this. I can't stress enough. The goal here is to make it easy for the persons receiving this file so that they don't have any mystery of why it's set up the way it is. Just for contrast, let me show you a worst case scenario, a file that shows what not to do when you send out a production file. This is something I got from a free website, and let's take a look at it in wireframe mode. Looks pretty confusing with everything that's going on here. It seems like this is the actual repeat tile, but it's weird that it's cropped. Wait. No, it's not cropped because I can see things extending beyond the box. It must be a clipping mask. I'll go into object clipping mask release. Now, it looks more like a repeat tile that I can work with. But if I zoom in here, here's the bounding box, and I'll hide that for now. If I click here again, there's another box. This one's filled with white. If I fill it with a color, I realize, this must be the background color, but it seems like there's some transparency here too because these leaves aren't the same colors as those outside of the background color. Now I've got that issue to deal with as well. Now if I go into wireframe mode, I discovered that there's duplicates of some of the motifs. If I click on this one line and hide it, there's still more of them underneath. Furthermore, I discovered that the tiles themselves don't line up perfectly. See that? This is a perfect case of what not to do when you're setting up a production file. Make it clean and simple and understandable. Let's go back to the list, and Number five is to outline strokes and flatten transparency. Those are two things that we covered in the Q&A. Number six is group your motifs in a sensible way. If I was the production person having to use this file, I certainly hope that if I clicked on this, it wouldn't just highlight that one element, but the whole motif would be grouped. Just click on the whole motif and group each one of them. When they get the file, the person working on it will thank you that they only have to make one click instead of having to deal with little individual fragments. For a more complex design like this one, I would do some nesting groups. If I click on the repeat, first, the whole thing is grouped. Then if I ngroup that. Now when I click on this, I've got this whole little section grouped so that I could move it all together if I needed to. Then if I group that, now I've got the soldier grouped and the tree is separate and the little house and the garland. Obviously, I do the same for the other little groups here. Number seven is a little detail, and that is to give the repeat some reasonable dimensions. This one is currently 16.6 667 by 12.888 9 ". Now it's not really all that important since this is vector art and dimensions don't really matter, but I just find one little professional detail. Like we did before, if you want to change the scale, I'm going to make clipping mask first. I'll grab the bounding box, copy it Command C, paste in front, which is command F. Fill it, some shirts in front, which it's not. Sometimes that happens. Right click, go around down to arrange, bring to front. Now, grab the whole thing. Go to object, clipping mask, make. Now I can easily change the size. Making sure the link button is checked. I'll change it to 16 ". Now I'll uncheck this box so that I can change just the other dimension, and let's make it 12.25. It's still a decimal, but a lot more simple than the previous one. Now that changed the proportions of the design a little bit, but not really enough to make it noticeable. Now I'll just use my direct selection tool and get rid of the clipping mask. The final three items on the checklist are just final details, housekeeping, and proofreading. Number eight is to double check all the pan Ton numbers. That means right here where I typed them in. I just want to proof read those because even though they are correct in your swatches panel, if they're not typed in here correctly, that can bring up some problems in production. I've had that happen before. I just go through, click on this, see what the number is, and make sure that it matches this one here. Down to the last two, and number nine is to empty show all. We've talked about that before, but that's just going to object, and then show all and here it's grade out, which means there isn't anything hidden, so you're fine. Finally, number ten is to delete all unused watches, and we've covered that a couple of times. It's just clicking up here, going to select all unused, and then clicking on the trash. That's all ten points in the checklist. By the way, a downloadable copy of this checklist is available in the class resources. 19. Wrap Up & Project: Congratulations. You've made it through the class. This was a big one. In fact, this was the biggest class I've ever undertaken for skill share. Getting through all of it tells me you really are serious about being a professional surface designer, and that's great. Now, I don't want you to feel intimidated by the production process. Most times it's simple and easy and goes very smoothly. But now you'll be better equipped to handle whatever production situation arises. Project is now to set up a professional production file. If you work in Illustrator, try setting it up with Pantone colors and set it up for rotary printing with a 640 1 millimeter screen just like I showed you in the scaling repeats lesson. If you work in Photoshop, try setting up a layered Photoshop file on a bigger size canvas so you can add all the appropriate information right there on the file. I have a favor to ask. I'd love it if you would take a minute to submit a review of the class. It helps me know what resonates with people and helps others know whether this class is a good fit for them. To do so, just go to the class page and you'll find a bar that says reviews. Scroll down to the button that says leave a review, and it really just takes a minute or two to answer some questions. I mentioned a free print production glossary that I put together for you. It has over 100 definitions in it, and I know you'll find it a handy resource. You'll find a link in the class description page, as well as on my profile page here on Skill Share. And don't forget about the premium digital guide. Now that you've seen just how much information is packed into this class, I'm sure you can see how valuable it would be to have it in a format that's easier to navigate than searching back through the videos. There's really nothing else like this on the market. You'll also find a link to this on my profile page, or you can just search the professional repeat on Skill Share. So thanks for taking the class and good luck with all of your print production adventures. 20. One More Thing...: Hi, again, I'm popping back in to let you know that I'm now available for one on one coaching sessions. If you like this class and would like to work with me individually, you can now do so by booking a session right from my Skillshare profile page. I offer two kinds of sessions. The first one is a 1 hour portfolio review where we'll look at your surface designs. I'll let you know some strengths and areas to focus on and you'll get the opportunity to ask any questions you'd like about art licensing or the surface design industry. Okay. Now I know can feel intimidating to show your work to somebody, but it's so smart to get professional feedback, and all the artists that I've worked with have felt energized and ready to move forward after our sessions. I also offer a 30 minute Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop instruction session. If you're struggling with any aspect of the software, I can help. We can walk through tools, I can demonstrate techniques and workflows that are going to help solve your issues. Okay. Whether you're looking for a one time session or an ongoing opportunity for feedback on your work. Coaching is such a great investment in your career. Unlike some of the expensive online courses that are available, coaching doesn't have a fixed curriculum. I can give you exactly the information and guidance that you need exactly when you need it. I hope you consider coaching. I would love to work with you and I can't wait to meet you and support you and guide you on your creative journey. And you can learn more about my coaching sessions at chris ruff.com slash coaching.