[Music] [Laura Coyle] So we're going to get started. I hope everybody's ready. It's not a cooking show, even though I'm wearing an apron.
This is actually one of the designers I'm going to talk about. Just a little inspiration upfront to get us interested in making patterns in Illustrator. But first, I want to introduce myself.
I'm Laura, Laura Coyle. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. And anybody else here from Atlanta? Okay. All right. Hey, y'all.
So I have been working in Adobe Illustrator my whole career. I've been a freelance illustrator for 30 years, and I've learned a few things along the way, and I want to teach you some of those things today. I've worked in a lot of different project types. You can see I've got a Halloween card there that I did for Papyrus. I think those are actually in Target right now. There's still some out there. And then advertising, magazines, and art licensing.
So a lot of different project types over those 30 years. And these days I'm teaching, and you can find me on YouTube, and I have my own learning community.
And these are my socials, and I hope you will check them out and we can connect. I also have this QR code, and this is going to take you to a page on my website that has additional resources. So one of the demos, there's a few little elements to make a pattern with, and there's some associated tutorials and things like that and some resources. And then also, every session has a page on Adobe MAX's website. When you go to mine, you can get a PDF, a download. And it's a workbook basically that has steps. So for anything that's a demo in here, you don't have to worry about taking notes, it's all in there. I just want to plant some seeds for you today so you know what you can do in Illustrator to make patterns.
So what I want to do here is I'm going to move on to the next slide. I want to start out by-- Well, first of all, patterns are everywhere. I'm sure you've noticed, wallpaper was something like people were tearing off the walls when I was a kid, and now for 10 years or so it's just been a huge thing. And then, of course, on fabrics and fashion, they're everywhere. And actually, Illustrator is really one of the most used programs for making repeat patterns.
So I wanted to start off by giving you some inspiration, and these are some friends of mine. This is Veronica Galbraith. She is a Colombian designer, and she made this beautiful apron, which is just, the color is incredible and the pattern is Adobe Illustrator. And she has worked as a web designer and as an industrial designer, and she always wanted to create her own line of products, and so she did it. Her website is Republic of Happy, and she makes these incredible kitchen textiles, and fabrics, and other goods that you can find there. And I just love it that her work is, so infectiously colorful and bold and very full of Illustrator goodness.
And then next, I have Von Glitschka. Does anybody know Von Glitschka here? Yeah. Well, he's like a huge-- He's a great illustrator. He's a great web designer. I'm sorry, a logo designer and branding designer, and he teaches illustrator. He's incredible. And so one of the things that he does is brand patterns. So he'll take a logo that he's for a branding client and make a pattern out of it. And I think it just extends what he's able to do for his clients. In fact, I love this one because it's so striking.
It's really simple. He took one of his beautiful emblems and just changed the color and turned it upside down and it makes a really, really striking repeat.
And then my friend, Teri Larson, who was a fashion designer for many years. She was the Head Designer at Florence Eiseman Children's Clothing, which is a really high-end clothing brand. And she even did some work for the Obamas. And she always wanted to create patterns because her job was all about selecting the fabrics and putting these looks together, and now she's creating patterns to inspire other fashion designers.
And so you can find her work, I have links for her, but you can find her work on Spoonflower. So does anybody here know about Spoonflower? Okay. Now I'm really seeing some hands go up. Great. So she has a ton of work on Spoonflower, and we're going to use that. For those of you who aren't familiar, it is a online fabric printer. And you can do fabric, wallpaper, and other goods there. And that's just one of many print on-demand sites online. So what I want to do is show you how you create a pattern in Illustrator and then how you get it up to one to a site like Spoonflower.
And then here is just a sampling of her work. She's incredibly prolific and she has-- I'm not sure if it's 1,000 designs on Spoonflower, but it's pretty amazing. So you can get fabric, or wallpaper, or lots of different things with any of this art on it.
So I think there's four ways of creating patterns in Illustrator. You know there's always more than one way of doing anything in Illustrator. And the first is creating by hand on an artboard, which I think is a really important skill. And we're just going to start with, well, we'll get to that, but we want to just see how a pattern is actually made to begin with before we look at the Pattern Editing Mode, which is really the core feature in Illustrator. And that's the one that offers you the most flexibility and is really the probably the best for getting your work out into the world. There's also the repeats feature, which is a newer feature that came about when the iPad version of Illustrator was introduced. And then there's Text to Pattern, which is the newest, and that's generative AI.
So let me move on to another slide here, and we're going to start with the repeat feature.
So here I have some art. You could take your logo or whatever. It's the perfect way to just get something and to repeat really quickly and start getting some ideas down on paper. So I'm going to go to Object-- Wait, let me make a copy of this actually. I want to show you the comparison. Object and Repeat, Grid.
There's three different types, but this is the one that's great for repeat patterns and it gives you these handles here so you can see more of the pattern or less of the pattern. And then we have handles here that let you change the spacing. So it couldn't be faster. You can put a color rectangle behind it. You can edit inside of here, and I'll show you that. But first, there's more options that you can see here on the Properties panel right down here in the middle. And this is numerically spacing the tiles out, but you can also come over here. I just did the spacing before with the handles. I find that to be the easiest. But then we can do a brick shifting everything horizontally or shifting it vertically. And then we have flip by row and flip by column, so you can turn your cats left and right, or upside down, right side up. So it's a great way to get some art in here and just figure out what combination is going to work for your art. Now this doesn't make a pattern fill swatch, which is what we're used to in Illustrator, and so getting this out is going to take a few extra steps.
But you can expand this art and use it like this and it will be clipped in a clipping mask. If you want to edit inside here of this repeat object, then it's like working in Isolation Mode. So let me go ahead and I'm getting a color here and I'm going to get the Star Tool. Let me do this. I'm going to double-click. So Isolation Mode, any of these cats, any of the groups here, you can double-click to go into Isolation Mode, and you can see now you're inside of the pattern, and then you can add to the artwork, you can edit the artwork. But I just wanted to show you that the size of that repeat unit grows and shrinks with the art. So it's not a great way of coming up with an actual specific size, but this is, again, what I really like to use for testing out and trying out and just getting my ideas down really quickly. And then it inspires me and I'm ready to go into Pattern Editing Mode to work with that.
So we're editing inside of Isolation Mode here. Let me cancel that. And then I'm going to get out of Isolation Mode. So that's the basics of the repeats feature. We also have-- I want to show you the Generative Fill, I'm sorry, the Generative Pattern feature.
And this has been around now, I think, during the past year, but it's improving and it's improving in this next version. So to use this, you're going to go to the Window menu and open the panel, Generate Patterns.
And here we have the variations that I've created for this. And be thinking of a prompt if you have one to give me. But what this one is here is evergreen trees in the snow, and I think the main thing that you want to know about this feature, getting the most out of it for what it can do right now, is probably working with this little button here, color and tone, because you can limit the number of colors. And I think when you're doing generative art, generative vector art, you can really easily get a ton of colors, which means a ton of little paths and it just gets harder and harder to edit. So I would use this to maybe choose 15 or something like that, and that's going to get you probably a better, more editable result. And then you can also use this plus button here to add colors, maybe your brand colors in here, and use that to guide your prompt. And then there are some different styles here, geometric, flat design, and doodle. And we can see those, like this one right here is geometric.
And here are some variations. And here I am, I'm actually applying this to show you on the stroke instead of the fill. Does anybody do that, or is it just me? After all, I just said I've been doing this for 30 years, and that still gets me every time. So there's some of the different variations.
And then this one is the doodle style, so it adds that little outline there.
And then this one is the flat design. So my big tip for you here is I think simpler is better, fewer colors is better, and use this as a way of ideating and figuring out how you might do something. So if I type in Halloween cats.
We'll see how fast the internet is here. It's going to help you, I think, just think, "Oh, okay, yeah. I see the tails are going in different directions and there's an idea." There's something that I could apply to my own artwork there. Let's see. That one's interesting. And it's using that blue color that I picked from before. All right. So probably not the most Halloweeny color there. But, yeah. Okay.
So I feel like my job is safe. I don't know, right now.
It is scary though. You're right. That is a very Halloween, slightly creepy cat there.
So play with this, and just know that in the newest version, there's also a density slider that's going to help you make it larger or, I mean, more spaced out or more dense. And then what's happening here is we're creating a pattern fill swatch, and we're really going to talk about this more when we're talking about Pattern Editing Mode. But they're right here when you click on them in your Swatches panel, and then when you double-click on it, you're inside Pattern Editing Mode editing it. And we're going to spend some time in here, but maybe not with our little one-eyed cat friend right now. All right. So let's see, that's the Generate Patterns panel. Now let's get down to business, and we're going to make a pattern. So first, I have these four guidelines of what makes a pattern repeat. And I'm saying here a basic pattern, and that's also a grid pattern. That's what's known as a grid repeat. Just think graph paper and every single square is a tile in the pattern. So you need a square or rectangular tile, and here I have a 3x3 inch artboard, and we're just going to make a pattern here by hand without using any features in Illustrator. So we've got our square tile, and then we're going to use four corners that are identical. This is what we need in order for it to seamlessly repeat. And I'm going to use this element here and put it in the corner. It doesn't matter where it is, as long as it's in the same spot in every corner. So here, because I'm using an artboard, it makes aligning easier. I'm just going to go into my keyboard increment and make sure that it's set to 1 inch, so I can just nudge that 3 inches. And I'm going to copy paste in front. And when you use that Command or Control+F to paste in front, it just puts that exactly in front of the original and then you can nudge it over like that. So you can do it again, copy paste in front, nudge, nudge, nudge. And now all four corners are covered. The next thing is that you need to have the top and bottom art crosses at the top, and it must cross in exactly the same spot at the bottom, and same on the left and the right. Anything on the left has to cross on the right in the same spot. So I'm just going to put this here, and easily you can just copy paste in front and nudge it down. So just like a cooking show, I've already got my prebaked tile here. Let's take a look at it. So let's say I did this really perfectly and I've got all of my edges covered, four corners, top and bottom, left and right, then the inside is super easy, no stress, wherever you want to put stuff, it doesn't matter as long as it's across the edge. And then the next thing that we want to do is test it out to make sure that it works and there aren't any flaws in it. So I'm going to use this 3x3-inch square, and we're just going to crop it down with a clipping mask, just for the sake of this test here. So let me get this artboard active. And I'm going to take the 3-inch and align it like that, and it's perfectly aligned to the artboard. So also really important, everything you do when you're making patterns, you just need to be very precise. In fact, if I moved any of those things, I might create a flaw in the pattern. So I'm going to mask this Command or Control+7, and I'll copy it. This is now my tile, and I'm going to copy it to my clipboard and go and test it out.
And before I do that, this is what we're looking for. So on the left, we see a nicely repeating pattern. Now we don't want lines in it normally, but I put the lines there just to show you that Grid Repeat and how all four corners are matching up with their neighbors' top and bottom, left and right like that. And then on the right, we have what can happen if you, maybe aren't using a precise method or maybe you change the size of that tile or the artboard without changing all of the art, those things can create a mismatch like that.
So now let me go ahead and I'm pasting my tile in. I'm going to hold down the Shift key just to make it smaller so we can fit more in here. And of course, you want to hold shift to keep the proportions the same. And then I'm just going to turn on my smart guides and just by hand tile this out. So I'm Option or Alt dragging and holding Shift and just going to see, watch it snap there. There we go. I'll do the same thing, Option/Alt and snap it.
And that looks good. So far so good. I'll use Command or Control+D to finish that row.
And then I'll do the same thing, and we'll see how it's doing vertically.
Yeah. It seems to be working.
All right. Command or Control+D. Yeah. All right. So what we have here is a seamlessly repeating pattern. That tile is working. It doesn't look like anything's going wrong there, but it's not the most exciting pattern ever. It's real easy to see where those corners are and to just see where that tile is. And this is something that as a pattern designer, you want to work on trying to disguise the repeat or at least make it more interesting. And so I think that this is where Pattern Editing Mode can really help because it allows you to do some different things here that might be harder to do by hand. But I think it's great to know how to do this by hand. So here's an example of those same elements in a different repeat layout. This one is known as a tossed repeat because it's like tossed confetti and all of the elements are going in different directions and are turned around and that's one way to make something look not quite so regular. Make it look more random. And in this case, I have a larger tile with more elements packed in. So you can make that tile, here's an example much larger. So that center area, the part where you're not worried about the repeat, you're really focusing on how are you going to disguise the repeat, make it look random, and spend the time to work with those different directions.
Here's another example.
In this case, you can probably spot the repeat. You can see where the repeating elements are. These big green plants here, there's four of them like that and here are the other ones that you can see. So you see the repeat but there's a shift going on there, like a vertical, everything is shifted down. And so that just makes it more interesting how you think of polka dots being shifted like that. And this one, actually, I created this in Pattern Editing Mode and it's a hexagonal repeat, so the tile itself is a hexagon.
So now that we've looked at those examples, we're going to go into Pattern Editing Mode, and I'll show you how it works. But I also wanted to point out again, I mentioned that PDF before. This PDF has a lot of other things in it. And so this will tell you, you can get this art from my website and go through the steps here to put this into the Swatches panel and make a pattern fill swatch out of it so you can do other things with it. Its more instructions in the PDF. But let's move over to working in Pattern Editing Mode. So I saw some hands go up when I said, do you work in Pattern Editing Mode? And so you may know if we look at this on the left here, this is what we just did by hand. But on the right, I have one of each of these copies here because Pattern Editing Mode makes the copies for you. This is all the art that you need to start making something that looks like this. And I'm going to go up to the Object menu and Pattern, Make.
And this puts us into Pattern Editing Mode. Now this is giving us a little notice here that it's making a pattern fill swatch for us and any edits we make are going to be applied to that pattern fill swatch. And here it is right here in the Swatches panel. But I just want to stop right here and just give you a point that I think really helps to understand for when you're wanting to make patterns that you're going to actually get out into the world, put them on aprons, and wallpaper, and whatever you want to put them on, is that the final result of this process here inside of Pattern Editing Mode is a pattern fill swatch. And a pattern fill swatch is what we use to decorate our paths in Illustrator and shapes in Illustrator. It's not final finished art that's ready to just send off to somebody. You need to release the pattern, the tile or the repeat from the pattern fill swatch first. And I'll show you how to do that, but that's really what we're doing here is we're working on making a pattern fill swatch. And you'll understand that more in a second. So I'm just going to click OK. And notice we're in a different mode like Isolation Mode. There's that bar across the top, so we know we're in a different part of Illustrator here. And in the Layers panel, we're really only working on one layer. All of those elements here are just on that one layer, so there's only one layer in Pattern Editing Mode. We can see the artboards, which are not relevant here, so I'm just going to turn them off because they're getting in my way visually.
And there are some tools that don't work in Pattern Editing Mode. The Shape Builder tool is one that doesn't work here, which is like, "That's my favorite tool." I'm really sad it doesn't work inside Pattern Editing Mode, but it's okay because I think you should be making your art on the artboard and then bringing in here using this to arrange the pattern. So even with those limitations the beauty of this is that we can just move these around and see the pattern update automatically and design visually like we want to without the nudging and that kind of thing. So what I want to do is just show you a few quick things about this panel here so you'll know what's going on. At the bottom, we have these view options so you can see more copies or fewer copies. And I would recommend fewer maybe if your art was really complex and had a lot of anchor points because that'll help Illustrator work faster.
We can dim copies or have them at 100%. The reason we want to dim them is just so that we can see them because everything out here is a simulation, it's not selectable.
But if we go into-- Let's see, Command or Control+Y, Outline Mode, you see, that's all we really have that we're editing and selecting here. So these options at the bottom can help you with that. And then we show tile edge so we can get that out of the way and show the Swatch Bounds, and I'll show you what that is in just a minute. But let's go up to the top. Here, we can name our pattern. I'm going to call this one MAX, and that's going to just name the pattern fill swatch, so we'll see that in the Swatches panel. And then here we have the tile type with all of the different repeat types. And I want to show you those, but first, I'm going to-- Let's see, get a few of these out of the way, just to make it a little simpler.
Okay. So here is our Grid Repeat. All four corners are the same, and that's what you start out with just by default when you come into Pattern Editing Mode. Also, the size of the tile, it was automatically sized by Illustrator just to hug all of those elements, so we can adjust this size later. But let's go here and look at the other tile types. So here we have Brick by Row, so we've got that shift or offset happening just like with the cats before, and this gives you other options for different fractions here. I usually leave this at a half. And then Brick by Column, so we're going vertically, and then Hex by Column is you can see all the dots come closer together, so that's a good way of getting your elements packed in more. And then we have Hex by Row. So we can do either of those shifting patterns in vertical or horizontal.
But what I want to show you here is that when we look at this Hex by Column repeat, notice the tile itself is a hexagon. But you see this little dotted line outside of here? It's faint. But that is this, if we look down at the bottom, Show Swatch Bounds that check box that can just flash this off and on for you. This is really key here in Pattern Editing Mode. What's happening is Pattern Editing Mode because we're making a swatch, and that's really what this feature does, pattern fill swatches can only repeat on a grid. And so any of these other repeat types here inside Pattern Editing Mode are being translated into a Grid Repeat. So this rectangle is a Grid Repeat tile. And I can prove this even though this is the only again, that's the only piece of art that I'm working with here. And if I just put it over here on the corner, there it is. It's a Grid Repeat. All four corners are the same. It's the same thing if we look at the other repeat types that are not Grid Repeats. Here we go, Brick by-- I'm going to do Brick by Column. This is what's known in pattern design as a half drop. And you can see there's this and this is halfway down. So the tile is still your active area of art. But if I move this up to the Swatch Bounds, you can see again, it is a Grid Repeat. It's translated for you now. All four corners are the same, left and right, top and bottom are the same.
So that's what Pattern Editing Mode is doing, and that's going to help us release this art from the swatch in order to send it off to a printer or print on-demand.
So now what I want to show you is just a little bit about the middle here, where we're going to size the pattern. And I'm going back to the Grid Repeat just so we can go back to this familiar art here. And I put the other elements back in, so I'm just going to set this up like we had it before. And then here in the middle, you have two directions you can go in. One, you can let Illustrator come up with the size of the tile for you. That is this check box here, Size Tile to Art. I usually just check both of them to be simple and straightforward. When boxes are checked, then the art moves and resizes the tile as you move it around. You can add horizontal and vertical spacing. Then if you uncheck these, now you have control over that tile size, which I think is really essential for any time you want to actually have something that's going to be maybe a print that you're going to have on a pillow or anything that's a real world dimension. And so here, you can type in dimensions, but there's also a Pattern Tile Tool here. You can see this is a toggling off and on button. When I turn it on, I have now these handles like bounding box handles, and I can just rough in a size here that's working for my motifs. And then I can turn this off, removes the handles, and now I can just dial in a more precise measurement here. So whether you're working in inches, or centimeters, or pixels you want to think of a dimension that's going to be regular and make sense so that further on down the line, the math is not going to kill you. So I like to avoid decimal numbers. So this is 4.0506, I'm going to take that out. And just make it 4 inches. And then here, this one's actually really close to 4. I'm going to unlock these. And there it is. I'll just use this. This one will be 4x4. So it's sometimes a back and forth process, or sometimes you come in with an actual knowing what tile size that you want there. So that's how you can work with that. So now that we've looked at most of the options here, and I'm going to leave time for questions at the end, so if you have more questions about this, I'm happy to answer them. But I want to just show you a couple of more things when we exit here. A tip for Pattern Editing Mode is saving is exiting and exiting is saving. And this is important because if you're in the habit of saving your work, just Command or Control+S, watch what happens. I'm going to do that, Save. Boom. It takes me out of Pattern Editing Mode. It's exited me, which is my artwork is saved, that's fine. And it's here in the Swatches panel, and I can get right back in by going to my MAX swatch and then double-clicking on it, and I'm back in Pattern Editing Mode. The reason though this is important to watch out for is because Pattern Editing Mode expands live content. So watch what happens. I'm going to just go ahead and get a color and a brush, and the paintbrush tool, and just draw here. And there I have my paintbrush line. You can see this is live. It's just a single path with an art brush applied to it. And now when I exit, I'm just going to this time use that little arrow to exit. It's going to save it, but it's giving me a warning and it's telling me that. So symbols effects, if you use free form gradients, they get turned into an image. So it's important to know about this. Create your art, like I said, out on the artboard, and then you will always have a fully editable copy of it.
So here, if I want to get the vectors out of here, and we'll go into more depth about this in just a minute, but I just want to drag this pattern fill swatch to the artboard just to show you that...that is that same brush stroke, and now because it's been through that process, it got expanded. All right. So just be aware of that.
So now what I want to show you is just a few tips for sizing your pattern. So this is the PDF where you will see all of this information, but I also wanted to show you right over here on the left, the Dimension tool. So here I'm using the new Dimension tool feature in Illustrator, which allows you to just click and dimension out things. And it works nicely for motifs like this. So I can say, I'm starting out here, I know my scale is this 14x14 pillow. And that means I want my flowers to be 6 inches or whatever it is, whatever type of pattern I'm creating there. And so I work towards that. I even print them out even on a black and white laser printer just to be able to take some flowers and put them around and figure out how big they really are in real life because it's hard sometimes to judge by what you're seeing on screen. And so once you come up with a size that you like your motifs at, then you can bring them into Pattern Editing Mode, work back and forth with the pattern tile tool like I was showing you. So that's how to aim for that real world sizing. Now what I want to show you is, what these pattern fill swatches are good for. I mean, obviously, I think most of us probably know that, but here I'm going to look at this in outline mode so we can see the pattern fill swatch, it's a representation of that pattern, but it's not actually the final vector art.
So I use pattern fill swatches for technical drawings and presentations for using in recolor artwork to figure out what my color schemes are or figure out different color schemes. And so that's what I use these for, but when we want to get it out into the real world, we need that vector art.
And here's an example, Spoonflower. I saw a lot of people raising their hands. This is just a shot of the website there. What they do is digital printing. It's like a giant inkjet printer that the fabric is going through, and what they need from us as a designer is, they need a single tile at the size, and it needs to be 150 PPI, and it's an RGB image. So when you upload that, and I'll show you how to get that art out, then it instantaneously gives you all of these mock ups, which are so wonderful so you can really check and see what products it looks good on, how the scaling is working out. And that's really a lot of fun to check it out and I think a great way. Everybody should be doing this. So now I'm going to go through these steps quickly just to show you, and you'll have these steps in the PDF. And this is for getting that art out of that pattern fill swatch so that we can upload it to a print on-demand printer.
All right. So how I'm going to do this? I'm going to use one of the earlier patterns here and just drag it, drag the pattern fill swatch out to the artboard. And I'm going to turn my artboards back on so you can see this. So what we have here, remember that dotted line in Pattern Editing Mode? That is this rectangle that you can see here at the edge. So it's a Grid Repeat tile from this pattern that could have been a hex repeat, could have been a half drop, whatever. So I'm going to ungroup this...
And come here and select this carefully because I don't want to move it everything has got to be perfect there. And then I'm going to go up to the Object menu and I'm going to create an artboard out of this. So like what we started out in the beginning, we started from an artboard, we're going to end up with an artboard now. So I'm going to Object, Artboards, Fit to Selected Art, and now I have an artboard that's perfectly cropped to that pattern tile and I've got elements bleeding off of the edge there. And the artboard is there, I don't really need this background shape, but I'm going to make a color for it so I can have a background color for this. And I'm just going to make it larger so that the background, like the elements and the motifs are bleeding off of the edge. And so now it's ready to export. I'm going up to File and Export and Save for Web.
And I love Save for Web because it's really easy to see what's going on. So I'm going to do the math here. I brought my calculator. What you need is to get the pixel dimensions, you need the size of the tile, in this case, mine was 13 inches. So the width was 13, I can't remember what the height was, but we're going to deal with the width. And the PPI that Spoonflower asks for is 150. So if I multiply 13 times 150 equals 1950. So I need an image that is 1950 pixels wide. So I'm going to type this in here. 1940, nope. 1950.
There we go. It's vector art. So in the expanding process, Illustrator, it's perfect. It can go bigger, as big as you want it.
And then Art Optimized is good to have checked. Clip to Artboard is essential because we're cropping this, and then I'm going to click Save.
And I'll call this MAX, and I'll put it on my desktop so I can find it. And now what we're going to do is we're going to do that testing step, but we're going to do this in Photoshop. So I will-- Let me go back to my desktop here.
Desktop, MAX, and I'll drag that into Photoshop. So I'm taking this PNG tile that I just created and I'm opening it in Photoshop to use the Pattern Preview. Have you used Pattern Preview in Photoshop before? It's great for previewing Grid Repeats. It's actually all it does. It doesn't do half drops or brick repeats. So it's perfect for this. So we go to the View menu, Pattern Preview, and click OK. And now in Photoshop, we're looking at that tile nicely tiled out. And what I like to do here is just look at that edge. This is very faint, I'm sure because of the blue. But when you see that edge, you just look off of there and look down this direction just to see if there's any gaps in that tile. It's possible. It happens sometimes when you see a gap in the tile. Here's an example of one, and there's a tiny line there. But it's not hard to fix that, and I have some steps for that in the PDF, and I can address that, in the questions if you have questions about that. But I want to just jump back to Illustrator. So now that we've got that PNG at the perfect size, we can upload it to any print on-demand site that takes repeat patterns. So here is Spoonflower's uploading page. This is what you see. You get a preview of it. And then just be sure you check Basic. Because again, this is a Basic repeat, it's a Grid Repeat. Even if you created it as a half-drop, a brick, a hex, or any of those interesting repeat types, it's still a Basic repeat.
And here it is on another site. This one is called Contrado. So all of these sites, same thing. Here it is. It says Basic pattern. So that's your Grid Repeat from the pattern fill swatch in Illustrator.
And then here is the page in the PDF that just talks about avoiding fractions of pixels. So before when I said you want to stick to regular increments, that's going to be best for exporting a tile too. Illustrator can create an artboard that is 1000.03 pixels wide. It can do that because we work in centimeters and inches, and we're converting all the time. But once it's out into pixels in the real world, it rounds up. So just make sure that you check out to see that you're working with round numbers of pixels, and you won't see those lines then.
All right. So that's Pattern Editing Mode in a nutshell. There's I'm sure a lot more to it. I know for sure there is. But I want to show you another feature that is really great working alongside here, and that is Mockup. Has anybody been using this feature in Illustrator? Yeah? I see a couple of hands. It's actually, it's so easy, and I think you should check it out. This is just an image here, and this is a vector. That's what you need. A vector on top, an image underneath, the image can be your image. It doesn't matter. I mean, anything you can-- I put the IKEA catalog in here and just was like dragging these vectors over it. It's really incredible. So whatever your image is, it can be embedded or linked. And then, I'm going to show you one other thing. We're going to talk about, because we're talking about patterns. If you use a pattern fill as your artwork, as your vector, it's going to give you a warning, it's not going to work great. So I have some steps here for expanding. It's just Object, Expand like you do with other artwork. You can expand a pattern fill too. And I think you're going to get better results if you expand your pattern fill art. So here's an example of some expanded pattern fill art we can see. There it is. And I put it over this pillow photo, and I just select both of them, and then I'm going to go up to Object, Mockup, and Create Mockup.
And it's mapping out the surfaces here. And then, I mean, instantaneously, practically, it's conformed that pattern to that product. Now it does look flat, admittedly, but we can use a blending mode to make this work. But when you see this here, you can move this and reposition it like that. This is moving a little slow right now.
And in the new version of Illustrator, I've been playing with it, it's actually even faster. I mean, it's pretty fast, it's amazing. I'm going to go ahead and just give this a Opacity, Multiply blending mode. And because I have that white background, that's looking a lot more realistic, it's picking up the shadows from the white pillow underneath. So I mean, to do this in Photoshop, yes, you could do a really perfect job and it could be really incredible, but it would never be this fast. This is amazing.
And so it's worth looking for photos that have white backgrounds like this. And I'm showing you this one that has white everywhere just to remind you that it's looking at surfaces, it's not looking at color. So it's not going to help if I have a guy with a sleeve here and I start dragging that art over that. It's not going to see the difference between the short sleeve and the rest of the arm. It's not going to-- It wouldn't matter if this mannequin were dark and this were white. It doesn't see the color, it just sees the surfaces. So you want to look for something where there's a clear edge and the white is going to let your artwork shine through. And here, you can see this is not a perfect edge here, so there's limitations to it. But if you find the right photo and the right art, you can get a mockup done really quickly that looks pretty amazing. I have another example of this one right here. And actually this is a design that I created for Adobe for this conference. So we've got Miami Hotels and lots of Illustrator Easter eggs. There's another one here with InDesign Easter eggs. So if you go to the community booth, you can get one of these.
But here, I put it on a Mockup. And I mean, it works on this photograph really, really nicely in just two seconds flat.
So that's Mockup. And okay, well, thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you.
[Music]
