Tips for Perfecting Your Surface Pattern Designs
As a surface pattern designer, you may have encountered the frustrating problem of the 'white line.'
This issue can occur when applying a pattern swatch to a shape in Adobe Illustrator or when exporting a pattern as a JPEG file at 300 dpi.
After much research and trial and error, I have discovered some tips that have worked wonders for me and may help you as well.
Here are my tricks to get rid of 'white line' problems:
1. Firstly, ensure that your pattern and artboard size should always be in whole numbers. I found that artboards with standard inches dimensions (24x24, 12x12, 8x8, 6x6, etc.) work best when exporting patterns at 300 dpi.
2. Your artboard position should also be in whole numbers (like, for instance, x:0, y:0; or x: -64 inches, y: -48 inches)
3. If you do so, you can export your JPEG at 72, 144, or 288 dpi, and you will not get any white lines. But if you just go to export as JPEG, and choose 300 dpi, you will most probably get the white line again.
4. To avoid it, you should save your pattern artboard as an EPS file (save your merged pattern or the one with a mask applied). If you have a pattern collection in one file, you would like to save all of the patterns to separate files in the 'EPS' folder by choosing 'Use artboards' -> 'Range'.
5. After all EPS files with your patterns are saved in one folder, you need to open Adobe Photoshop, and go to Files -> Scripts -> Image Processor (no need to open any file).
6. Choose your EPS files folder, then at File Type check 'Save as JPEG', and choose files quality. I choose 10. And then press the 'Run' button. All JPEGs will be saved to a 'JPEG' folder inside of your 'EPS' folder.
7. All files will be 300 dpi. 24*24 inches will be 7200*7200 pixels, 12*12 - 3600*3600, etc. And NO WHIITE LINE!!! Yahoo!!!
With these simple tricks, you can say goodbye to white lines in your surface pattern designs, and your internal perfectionist will be as satisfied as mine is now.
If you have your own secrets for a 'white line' problem that work well for you, feel free to share them with me on social media or by email.
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