My cookie pattern uploaded to Spoonflower
Today I ordered my first set of sample swatches from Spoonflower. I had a lot of fun creating the patterns while attempting to make them into an interesting repeatable design without appearing too “matchy” and without negative space gutters. I discovered how much I enjoyed the challenging problem there is to making interesting repeat patterns that reminded me of when I used to paint and faced the challenge of reworking a composition until it looked “right” to me.
I designed my pattern in Adobe Illustrator. Usually Photoshop is always my go-to, but I wanted to work with strictly vector artwork to ensure I can scale it up later in the likely event that I don’t know what I’m doing and suddenly learn that I have to reupload something at a larger scale. Working with vectors over rasterized imagery allows you to make scaling mistakes and correct yourself later if you made too small of artwork. With my pattern designs, I started by taking some old artwork of cookies I inked by hand a couple years ago. I scanned in the original artwork and converted the lines to vector through auto trace and then digitally colored.
It took some trial and error with the overall workflow of submitting a completed design from Adobe Illustrator to Spoonflower. Formatting was fine, but I kept running into weird issues where I would see a faint border that wasn’t there to begin with. Fun! I found the best way for me to prevent these weird ghost lines was to make a new art board with the background slightly bleeding over the boundaries. I use the Save for Web functionality and set the export size to 2000x2000 px (about 13 inches at 150 DPI). Spoonflower prints with 150 DPI, so if you’re used to 300 DPI, no big deal, just be prepared for them to scale it differently to match 150 DPI. Speaking of, I’m still having an internal battle with myself on how big should I scale my pattern. When I uploaded my swatch and saw it on a napkin, I thought the elements in the pattern looked abnormally huge (you could only see like 4 cookies), but if I were to scale the pattern down too much, I’m subjecting folks to a migraine from the moire pattern unintentionally generated when previewed on a duvet. I highly doubt anyone would want to order my pattern on a duvet, so I guess I can rule that out. Honestly, I’m hoping they will use my pattern on things like tote bags and pet bandanas. So in that regard, I guess I can get away with a scaled-down pattern for now. I read the trick is to upload three different versions: small, medium, and large scale, but I supposed you can always upload one and allow custom scale requests.
I have no idea what I’m doing and will look back on this post one day and think—oh yeah that was fun, nice try Leslie…nice try. But hey, that’s how we learn!