How To Make A Pattern In Illustrator In Under 5 minutes.

Seamless patterns can be a very powerful tool when creating branding collateral for a client. Patterns are commonly used on business card, brochures, websites, and stationery. In this post we will show you how to create your very own customizable pattern swatch in under five steps. The assets used below you can download at Paaaterns for free!

Step 1:

Pick your pre-designed pattern or design one of your own. For time-sake we went ahead and used Paaaterns free pattern set. The pattern bundle is free on their website which you can find and download here.

Step 2:

Once you have your designated pattern go ahead and group that together by selecting the artwork and hitting Command+G. Once your artwork is grouped together find your swatch panel. If you do not see this you can go to your window tab and click on Swatch. From there your swatch window should open. Click the pattern we previously grouped together and drag that directly into your swatch panel. This will create a custom swatch for your pattern which we can customize later.

Step 3:

Now that we have your pattern as a swatch you can use the any marque tool to designate where you’d like to insert the pattern. For the sake of this demonstration we created a generic rectangular.

Step 4:

Now that you have your initial pattern on your art-board double click the custom pattern swatch we made earlier. This will bring to view your pattern options. From here you can customize your tile type, scale and copies. We decided to go with a 3x3 copied grid of the pattern to use for our hero image.

Step 5:

You can now use your pattern at will! To use singular aspect of the pattern you can expand the overall pattern to isolate individual vector shapes. You can do this by highlighting your pattern and going to Object > Expand.