Create Seamless Background Patterns with Adobe Illustrator CC

[Music] this is Nick with logos by Nick comm and in today's tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can create these repeatable background tiles using Adobe Illustrator so let's go ahead and set up a new document in Illustrator I'm gonna use custom as the template I'm gonna size of it 1920 by 1920 s and the unit of measurement is pixels and I'll go ahead and click create and what I want to do now is just set up the canvas so that we're all working with this similar workflow so let me let me uh come up here to where it says view move that back over let's come up here to where it says view and we're gonna want let me deselect snap to pixel from this view menu the only thing we're gonna want selected is snap to point and once you have that set just come over here to where it says window and make sure you have a line color and Stroke enabled from this from this windows menu here and this'll that's these windows down here on the right-hand side of the page that you see so what we're gonna do now is create a circle let me grab the rectangle tool right here if you click and hold on that you'll get this little flyout menu I'm gonna choose ellipse and I'm gonna come over here to the canvas and I'm going to click and drag and then hold shift and alt to create a perfectly symmetrical circle like that and what I want to do is get rid of the fill color because right now it's filled with white I'm sure to click this red X right here to get rid of that fill color and the black stroke we want to leave that I'm just gonna change the size of it to a hundred so come up here to where it says 1 change that to 100 hit enter and now what I want to do is come over to the transform menu it should be over here on the bottom right if you don't see the transform window just go to Windows and click on transform and it should appear all we want to do here is just make sure we have where it says scale strokes and effects make sure that's unchecked for the duration of this tutorial otherwise what we're gonna do won't work once we've done that let me go back to the Select tool I'm going to change the width of this to 300 but before I do that I just want to make sure I have this lock icon enabled where it says W for width I'm going to change this to 300 hit enter and now I want to come over here to the align menu and make sure you have the align to make sure it's set to align to artboard and I just want to Center this up on the horizontal and vertical axis like that so it's centered up on the artboard now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to edit copy and then go to edit paste in place and what that did was it created another copy and laid it right on top of it only you can't see it because they're stacked directly on top of each other but what I'm gonna do is change the size of them and then you'll see it so up here where it says with I want to add 400 to whatever this width is so I'm gonna add 400 to 300 it's gonna be 700 hit enter just like that I'm gonna do the same thing again I'll go to edit copy edit paste in place and I'll change the width of this one again we'll add 400 which would be 1100 and then I'm just gonna repeat this steps a couple more times I'll just go to edit copy paste in place add 400 which would be 1500 and then one more time copy paste in place and change this one to 1900 so what I'm gonna do now is let me just zoom out a little bit I'm gonna hold alt on the keyboard and roll down the mouse wheel once like that just to zoom out I'm gonna click and drag over all of these objects so I have all of them selected and I'll go to object path outline stroke and once I've done that I want to go to object compound path and choose make and now I just want to bring down the size of this a little bit so it's a little further away from the edge of the dock but I'm gonna hold a shift and alt actually no I'm gonna grab one of these nodes over here on the side then hold shift and alt and just scale that down a little bit like that that right there looks pretty good let me zoom back in what you want to make sure it's away from the pages the edges of the pages what I want to do temporarily is just go to view and turn on smart guides and then I want to grab the rectangle tool I'm gonna click on the circle tool and then grab rectangle from that menu and I want to snap the cursor onto the left edge the left edge in the center of this circle right here and then just click and drag and create a square coming up to the top center until it snaps on to the Anchor Point like that right there and once you've snapped it onto the anchor point let me go to the select tool I'm gonna click and drag over both of these objects and then I'll come over here to the Pathfinder menu again this should be active if not just go to Windows and click on Pathfinder and it'll open that menu for you and wait they're both selected I want to choose intersection right here and once I've done that I want to make a copy of this I'm gonna click and drag then hold shift and alt to create a copy of it and put it out here like this and I just want to rotate this around now in order to rotate it if you bring the cursor to the outside corner of the object that you'll notice that the cursor turns into a rotation icon and once you get that you can just rotate it around like this you could hold shift so it locks on to 45-degree angles like that go ahead let that go right there and let me turn off smart guides now I'll go to view smart guides turn that off and now I want to take this and snap it onto the edge there so let me zoom in again I'm holding alt and rolling up and down the mouse wheel I'm gonna hold ctrl and as you're held in control you're gonna get these nodes that appear you can grab one of those nodes and remember you're holding to control the whole time here snap it onto this corner right here just like that now let me zoom out a little bit now I'm gonna make a duplicate of this one right here click and drag and hold shift and alt to bring that down there and again I'm gonna rotate this around while holding shift let me zoom back in hold control grab this node and snap it right there onto that corner and now what I want to do is want to take this object here and create a duplicate of that so click and drag it and hold alt and then hold ctrl and grab one of the nodes and snap it onto the edge right there you may have to zoom in a little bit to make sure okay there we go and once we've snapped that onto there I want to take this object and I try to make this a different color just so we could differentiate it from the other objects I'm just gonna change to select red or whatever you want it whatever color you want to go with just go ahead and use that and now what I'll do is I'm gonna take this object click and drag it and hold alt so it creates a copy and I want to grab control hold control grab this node and snap it onto this corner right here so that we end up with an object like this right here now click off of that to deselect everything I'm gonna take this object and press Delete on the keyboard to get rid of it same thing with this object over here we'll get rid of that and get rid of that those were just reference objects that we could know where to position these this is what we're going for right here we want to take this right here and what I want to do now is I'm just going to zoom in on this a little bit I'm gonna go to the shape builder tool which is over here or you could press shift and M on the keyboard and I want to get rid of the areas where the black and the red intersect with each other going in here so I'm gonna hold alt and then I'll click on that and then it's gone do the same thing over here hold alt click on that and it's gone over here click on that one and then that one and that right there is what we're going for we're looking we're looking to get rid of the red the red anything that's red that intersects with the inside of the black stripes here to get rid of them and once we've done that I'm going to click and drag through all of these and select them all to unify them all together into one shape like that let me zoom out a little more let me grab the Select tool I'm gonna bring this to the top left over here I'm gonna create a copy of this on a click and drag then hold shift and alt and then I want to rotate this one around like this and then I'll hold control let me zoom in a little bit hold control take this node and snap it onto there like that me zoom out a little bit and now I want to take this object and duplicate this again I'm gonna hold it I'm gonna click it I'm gonna click and drag then hold shift and off like that and then I'll rotate this around until it flips it vertically like that now let me hold ctrl grab one of these nodes and snap it onto there like that and if you click off of it you can see we now have this single individual object here and if you take this object you can tile it next to each other infinitely and it creates a seamless pattern so let me click and drag over all of these right here I want to just unify them together with the unite tool the unite button under the Pathfinder menu like that and let me hold shift and alt and scale that down a little bit you zoom in what you can do is you can take this hold shift and alt to create a duplicate and then snap it right next to each other like that and do the same thing you could take this bring this down there and snap it onto there like that just repeating the same steps we previously did and this will go on infinitely you can do this over and over and over again and it creates an infinite seamless pattern from this one individual square right here so once you're done you could take this one individual square and export this as a PNG graphic or any other format that you'd like and then you could upload this to like a background of a website and it'll repeat infinitely regardless of the screen size of the the end user so I think that should do it for this tutorial that is how you can go about creating that simple seamless background pattern using Adobe Illustrator if you have any questions let me know and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Design Made Simple

Views: 396,592

Keywords: seamless background patterns, illustrator seamless patterns, background patterns adobe illustrator, illustrator for beginners, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: 4JZARIfHg2I

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 08 2019