- In my 30 years of talking to digital artists and designers
there's one topic that comes up over and over again,
regardless of discipline.
The topic that seems to bind us all
from one generation to the next.
The topic that, even when we're mad at each other,
we can agree this thing is cool, is patterns.
Maybe you thought I was gonna say logos
and we'll come to that soon enough.
But I really believe it's patterns.
Backgrounds, fabric design, maps, research, mathematics,
gothic, Victorian, Op art, skull, love,
undersea, nature, flower, lace.
There's no search term that will not turn up a pattern.
I think I mean that literally.
I just searched for the word pattern
and I got more than a billion hits.
That's almost as many as when I search for the word weather.
I mean for God's sake the almighty weather,
which I just misspelled in my mind so okay, I get that.
The old H instead of the A.
See, even spelling has patterns.
But still patterns are huge.
Vast beyond measure.
Hypothetically infinite.
And to bring it back down to earth size,
it all starts with a single tile.
Now a tile is a unit that repeats over and over.
Like the tiles on a kitchen floor.
A tile can be rectangular or hexagonal
and depending on how you create it
the tile may repeat with intentional edges
or so seamlessly that you can't tell
where one tile blends into the next.
Which is where the one gets lost
in the space of its neighbors
and the sense of the grand pattern begins to emerge.
A pattern may be expressed as a fill or a stroke,
in which case it repeats within
the physical boundaries of either.
But then there's this other thing, the pattern brush.
This guy allows you to repeat a series of tile patterns
along the length of a path outline.
One tile determines the appearance of the brush
along a segment and around a smooth point.
You can create additional corner tiles
that appear at corner points as well as start and end tiles
that appear at the end points of an open path.
Which makes pattern brushes perfect for creating frames.
Plus, you can assign them in the freeform path outlines
and even letter forms.
Simply put, there is nothing you can't do
with a good pattern in Illustrator.
Well, except maybe predict the weather,
as you're about to discover, in this very chapter.