Design How-To: Making Complex Patterns with Simple Lines

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Design How-To: Making Complex Patterns with Simple Lines

Textured backgrounds are a simple way to add interest and contrast to a layout. Here's how to make sophisticated-looking patterns by drawing on a few basic lines in your illustration program.

Written by John McWade on January 30, 2004

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Categories: Graphics, Illustration, How-Tos

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This story is taken from "Before & After" Magazine).

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Patterns add bite to an illustration or layout, but scanned images and other pixel-based backgrounds can add lots of bytes to your project as well. Vector textures are more efficient in terms of file size.

Better yet, PostScript patterns are infinitely scalable and repeatable, so they can be applied to any project, whether as large as a billboard or as small as a matchbook.

Best of all, programs like Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand make it easy to transform a simple line into a complex pattern.

See how to create and apply drawn patterns in this feature from our partner "Before & After" magazine.

We've posted this story as a PDF file. All you do is click this link "How to Create Texture with Lines" to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you'll need Adobe Acrobat (5 or higher) or Adobe Reader, which you can download here: