: Design Help-Creating a circular repeating pattern in Illustrator CS6 Years ago as part of a school project to create a calendar, I made several retro patterns in Illustrator to use as backgrounds.

@Murray976

The most difficult part of pattern creation is finding the proper pattern tile. You essentially have to examine what you see to figure out the smallest area possible which is repeating. When you try and create a tile which is too large you can easily run into alignment issues. For example, in your art, the circles are of varying sizes. Some are larger than others. This makes for a very uneven tile and subsequently,a misaligned pattern.

In your pattern, the base tile looks like this:



It is merely 6 circles - 5 the same size and 1 smaller. I've placed guides which intersect at the center of the outer circles. These guides indicate the edge of the needed tile.

So to create this pattern, simply create the artwork above, as I have. Then draw a no fill, no stroke rectangle which aligns to the guides, as I have them placed. Move this no fill, no stroke rectangle behind all other artwork via Object > Arrange > Move to Back.

Then select everything and drag it to the Swatch Panel. This will create a pattern swatch.

It's then a simple matter to apply the pattern swatch to the fill of an object.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Carla748

The basics, however, are to create the pattern, then select it and drag it into the swatches pallette (or use Object > Pattern > Make).

In order to make the seams more seamless, you can resize the artboard to the appropriate dimensions and export just the artboard portion.

In this case, I'd guess you can just resize the artboard to surround one of the white circles without overlapping any other white circles, like this (rough):



Alternately, you can just create this circle, including the green background, in a square and make sure everything is aligned and centered correctly, and then use this single circle to define the pattern.

More (tutorial screencasts):
- Define a pattern
- Create seamless patterns

Vote Up Vote Down