Creating Seamless Patterns in Affinity Designer

Step 1: Design your pattern elements

Since we’ll be doing a few sums and subtractions, we better create a Document with even values, to simplify our calculations. A 600x600px Document will work fine.

Tip: It’s better to create the elements we’re going to use beforehand, so we can concentrate on their design first and our pattern design later. Breaking down these two tasks will make our process a lot easier.

If you downloaded the Affinity Assets file included with this tutorial, you are half-way done with this tutorial, otherwise, I recommend you to create at least 10 simple objects of your choice (flowers, animals, ornaments…) that will be part of your final pattern design.

Before we even get started, let’s see the main rules you need to memorize (if possible) whenever you start a new pattern design. Don’t worry, we’ll be explaining these rules along the rest of the tutorial.

Three simple rules:

1. If an object is placed in a corner, you need to repeat that object in all four corners.
2. If an object touches any of the four edges of your document, you’ll also need to repeat that object on the opposite edge.
3. If an object doesn’t touch either a corner or an edge, you’re able to move it freely about your canvas without any worries.

See? It’s super simple. The key here is to know HOW to position the repeating objects in our canvas.

Step 2: Designing your pattern using Rule 1

Pick any object you like and place it precisely at the corner of your canvas. To make sure it is positioned correctly, open the Transform Panel and make sure you’re moving this object around its relative middle center (Fig.A), then type 0 (zero) in the X and Y input values (Fig.B).

Now that our design is perfectly aligned at the top-left corner let’s repeat it on all four corners.

Our document’s dimensions are 600px by 600px, to move our object to the exact opposite corner (bottom-right), we need to input 600, in the X and Y position fields (Fig.C).

Let’s copy this object again to fill the upper-right corner (Fig.D) and the bottom-left corner (Fig.E).

Step 3: Designing your pattern using Rule 2

Now that our corners are safely locked, we can start adding more elements to our composition. However, the little triangle we placed above, needs to be treated using Rule number two, since it’s clearly touching one of our document’s edges.

The first thing we need to do is to make sure that this object is positioned using whole numbers, this way will be more natural to calculate where its opposite position should be. In this case, its X-Y (horizontal-vertical) coordinates are 0 and 250.

So, we need to duplicate the triangle and move it 600px along its horizontal axis (X), being its final absolute position: X=600 and Y=250. Now, both triangles will match perfectly when our pattern gets tiled from its left or right edges.

Same thing happens when an object touches the top or bottom edges:

The selected shape above (x-like doodle), has an absolute position of X=200 px, Y=575 px. Since its bottom part gets cut-out from our canvas, we need to duplicate it and place it at the opposite top edge as well, to make it tile perfectly when our pattern gets repeated vertically.

To match the bottom shape, our duplicated one’s absolute position should be X=200px , Y= -25px. Here, we had to subtract its original Y position (575 px), minus the total canvas height (600 px). 575px – 600px = -25px.

At the beginning this might seem really confusing, but with a little practice and having a calculator at hand, you’ll get used to this method very fast. Trust me.

TIP: Keep an eye on the Navigator Panel, to have a better understanding of how your entire composition is working out.

Step 4: Testing and applying our pattern

Now, we’ll learn how to use the Symbols Panel in Affinity Designer, to test our pattern’s tile-ability.

Group all the objects you’ve created including the background, and mask them all using a 600 x 600px rectangle.