How to Create a Geometric Pattern in Illustrator

the beauty of inspiration is that it can come literally from anywhere the idea for this tutorial for instance came from a doormat i found the pattern on it really interesting because it is simple yet feels complex and almost three-dimensional in this video i will show you how to recreate this geometric pattern in adobe illustrator using a few extremely useful techniques [Music] whenever you create a pattern it always starts first by creating the tile and in this case it's a fairly simple tile but we will learn also how to use the transform feature to make working with this style much easier so let me show you what i mean if i zoom a little bit closer i can select any parts of this design and if i start moving it around you can see all of the sides are changing at the same time which is really cool we can also increase decrease the size of it so if i select this top section and start moving it out you can see again we can compress it or expand it further now of course if i start moving it to the side it starts again doing all kinds of different weird things but that's the beauty of using the transform effect as a live effect in illustrator but let's start from scratch i am going to use the line tool and just simply draw a vertical line holding down the shift key i can make sure it is straight so i'll set it up to something around that size and i'll zoom a little bit closer now keep an eye on the stroke panel here on the right side so i'm using 10 points for the weight and the cap currently i just set to round i might change this later but for now i'm going to keep it on that now the first effect that we will use is to duplicate this twice and using a 120 degrees rotation each time so for this i'll just go to the effect menu and from here choose distort and transform transform so once that's selected we get this big dialog box and here just have to make sure that you turn on the preview just so you can see what you're doing and then first of all we have to set the anchor point to be at the bottom so that is going to be the center of rotation in this case and i'll set the copies to 2 and i type in angle 120 degrees now you can see immediately how that looks now since we use the round cap there is a little bit of a gap here in the middle or at least it's not perfectly aligned so what we can do to fix that is to first accept this transform effect it will become a live effect and then if i come here into the stroke panel and switch the cap to the other option see immediately the alignment fixed itself the cool thing once again is if i select with direct selection tool the top anchor point and i start moving it around you can see how i can quickly extend it up and down or i can also turn it around as we've seen it before now i'm going to keep it somewhere around here and by the way illustrator has a really useful smart guide when it tells us that we are just simply extending a line so you can see the text there it says line extension what that actually means is if i draw a line in any angle and then i select an anchor point and start moving it around you see i can tell that the angle is not changing i'm just simply extending that line that's extremely useful in many cases and you'll see once again in this example we will be using that to make changes later on now that we have this first element that we created we can duplicate it holding down alt or option key we just click and drag it and align it here to the top end of this previous shape you should feel a snap when you align them together but you can also switch temporarily to outline view by pressing command or control y in this view you can use the direct selection tool highlight the points in the middle and if they are aligned to each other that means they are perfectly set on top of each other press command or control y again to switch back to the normal view and now what we will do is to expand this section here on the top because as you can see it is still a single line thanks to the live effect that we can keep track of in the appearance panel you can see there's the transform effect if i turn it off it hides those two instances of duplicates that is created with that rotation now what i want to do is to be able to keep only the left side of this or the right side depending which one you want to work with but for that i will need to go into the object menu and choose expand appearance once i do that now you can see turned into a group with no effects on it anymore so up here in the layers panel these are the three lines now and i am going to delete the one on the top and maybe also this one here on the right now we have this single line and it's set to a group but i'm going to ungroup it quickly with command shift g or ctrl shift g and actually there's another group inside it i like to simplify my objects so when there's unnecessary groups created especially when you are using expand you can just get rid of those and then continue working with a single item or single object in this case now that we have that path i'm going to set this one up with a round cap that's just going to join in better with the original design and i am going to actually reduce the line here a little bit so using the direct selection tool i just drag it in and notice once again there's the line extension smart guide which is extremely useful and then i'm going to select this shape and go up to the effect menu choose transform notice that it comes up here on the top because that's the most recently used effect by the way if you were to use apply transform it would apply exactly the same settings you used before while if you use just simply transform it gives you the option to dial in whatever value or settings you wish to work with now i'm going to set again up first the anchor point in this case my anchor point is going to be on the right side i want only one copy i don't want any angle and i want to reflect x so creating the duplicate on the other side horizontally now you can see that there is again a little gap there because of the round cap once again if i click ok and i come here and set it to normal cap it still has a problem because if we zoom closer and if i turn off this other group you can see that the actual edge of this stroke is further than the original point here now this is something actually we can fix best if we are using the transform feature and use a little bit of adjustment here under the move section so if i go into horizontal and start pressing the down arrow i can reduce that value and probably get to maybe minus two i think that's going to work and then just go back again to round cap maybe we need to go minus three and that's the beauty of using live effects that you can always go back and tweak any of the values we can be even more specific and let's say minus 3.2 or 3.3 something like that i think that's starting to get even more aligned maybe it could be even 3.5 yes i think that works nicely so if i click ok now we can show again the other design element that we had here and i can align it perfectly to the center point of this and then we can just zoom back a bit and now comes the interesting part we need to make sure that these two elements are merged together and the original transform effect is applied also on this top section that we just created so we need to make sure that is repeated here at the bottom right and left now in order to do that we would have to create a group and instead of using the original transform effect on this single line it should be placed on the group because that's going to allow us to have the effect applied on the whole group and whatever is placed inside the group is going to work with the effect it sounds complicated but actually it's very simple to set up so all we have to do is to come back to that line and save this setting that we created the transform effect as a graphic style in that way we will be able to apply it again very quickly and easily normally i like to clear my graphic styles so i would choose select all unused from the panel menu delete them all and then we can just click on the plus sign while that line is selected and that's going to create the new graphic style so now what we can do is to delete the transform effect from the line turn it into a group by pressing command or control g you can see now that single line is inside the group and the group is selected now simply click on the graphic style here so see how quickly and easily you can reapply anything that you create within the appearance panel onto an object by using graphic styles and that's also another important lesson to learn so now that we have the effect applied on the group and not on the object and by the way that's something that you can see by having a filled circle on the group that always shows that there is an effect applied there we can now just grab this other path on the top so the one that we created here and drag and drop it into that group we just created and once you place it in there you go this is exactly what we needed now both the group has the transform effect on it so if i select the group you can see i can turn this on and off so that's just the one to create the two instances at the bottom and then inside this group we have the path on top which also has its own transform effect which i can again turn on and off but the most important thing is i can make changes to anything i want so i can come here and start moving this line around and you can see how quickly and easily we can move that out or back in once again relying on the line extension i can make sure i keep the same angle there so i think that works quite nicely something like that and then of course we can also move these two points together down and with this i'm changing both transform effects at the same time all right so let's just stick to something like that now comes the part where we create the pattern now there's a couple of ways of doing this but my preferred way of doing it is by selecting everything that we have here and copying it so ctrl or command c and then click away to deselect everything and go to object menu pattern make before we continue i just wanted to let you know about our creative membership program for a small monthly fee you get access to over 200 hours of adobe certified online training courses master all the tools and skills needed to become a professional graphic designer or illustrator as a pro member you will get mentoring from me and my team access to webinars student forum and creative briefs to help you build an outstanding portfolio pro members can also download the project files for all of our youtube tutorials sign up at yessimodesigner.commembership and start your free trial today and now let's head back to the tutorial so this is going to start up a blank new pattern so there's nothing inside it but this is when we are going to place the one that we just copied so command or control v is going to place it in and first it's going to look like a mess because our pattern shape is much smaller than the actual design so i'm going to just come here select this icon from the pattern options and just quickly increase the tile size so just so you can see what is happening here so once i increase it we can see the original element in the middle and then we can see all the repeat element outside of it now the first thing that we will have to change is the tile type that's going to be in brick by column this case and all i'm going to do now is to start adjusting the tile size and get these shapes closer to each other now the cool thing is that no matter where i place this tile it's going to stay the same right so that doesn't affect it it's really just the size of the tile that's going to affect how the pattern is created so actually all you have to focus on is the width and the height values here within the panel now you can use the up and down arrows to increase decrease that and i'm just going to use the tab to jump to the height and you can see i can very quickly align things closer to what we need which shift tab you can jump back to another value and i would like to have them quite close to each other something like that and i think that's quite close now maybe this other one can come a little bit further in and they can come a little bit further still yeah i think that looks quite good now now of course you can always come back and adjust these values later on but don't forget that you can also play around with things like the stroke weight so if i increase that that might change the alignment a bit so let me just zoom a little bit closer and show you once again so we can increase decrease the stroke size and don't forget that you can come back to your actual design and select any of these points and still make adjustments so if i want i can reduce the length of these lines or i can also adjust the angle if i wanted to but for now i'm just going to keep it here zoom back a bit and i think that's going to work for our pattern so now we are ready to turn this into a swatch here if i click on done on the top there's going to be a warning which explains that once you turn something into a pattern swatch any live effects that were created will have to be expanded this is unfortunately something you have to give up on so you won't be able to come back into the pattern and adjust things and still relying on the transform effect so everything will be expanded into individual objects so all those lines you will still be able to adjust them but it's just not going to use that transform feature that we set up in the beginning so this is the point you will lose that setting but it's not a big sacrifice because we still have the original design and if we want to recreate a different tile with it we will still be able to use that so i'm just going to click ok and then here within the swatches panel now we have our new pattern so to try this out i have here a big artboard and i'm just going to apply this swatch and that's the design that we created now notice that in the other version that i showed you in the beginning i use different colors and there's something that's very simple to set up by going back to the swatch that we created in this tutorial we can double click on that swatch thumbnail which will take us back into the pattern editing mode and all you have to do here is to select the objects you wish to make changes to let's say in this case i'm going to select these three strokes and then we can just pick a color for them and immediately you can see it's updating there in the background once again we can select a different color for these and then let's set the color to the third one and if you're not happy with the color choice you can select everything together and choose the recolor artwork option from the top where you can go into edit and very quickly set up more interesting colors here you can even rely on harmonies from the top so you can pick up maybe something like split complementary or complementary options and then start moving them around i think that could be a useful way of finding colors that work well together and once you're happy just click ok and also click on done here on the top and your pattern is going to update and that's all i wanted to show you in this video if you find it useful please hit the like button and that way i will know that you are interested in these type of illustrator tutorials so i can make more of them in the future thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever we release new videos click on the link on my right and start your membership today to get access to over 200 hours of training courses and personal mentoring by me and my team of creative professionals have fun learning guys and i will see you in the next one

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 70,299

Keywords: How to Create a Geometric Pattern in Illustrator, how to make pattern in adobe illustratir, how to create pattern in illustrator, illustrator pattern, geometric pattern, create simple geometric pattern, simple pattern, design simple pattern, create pattern, pattern illustrator tutorial, how to create patterns in illustrator tutorial, how to create seamless patterns in illustrator, illustrator cc 2020, illustrator tutorials for beginners, adobe illustrator tutorials for beginners

Id: Ecz9ZWcKy_4

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020