What is the industry standard for surface pattern design? That’s a big question.
It all comes down to THIS.
What is your style?
Is your style more painterly, like a work of watercolor? Or are is it simpler with definite color separation. If you’re a watercolor artist, you are going to want to use a program that is pixel based. Some examples are Adobe Photoshop, or the Procreate app on the iPad. If your style has definite color separation and more flat, without the need of blending effects, then vector based programs are the ones for you. The most well known vector program (that I know if in my infancy of pattern design) is Adobe Illustrator (AI).
You’ll hear other surface pattern designers go on and on about how AI is the industry standard, and is sounds like some companies will ask for Adobe Illustrator formatted files. But again, it depends on what type of design it is. It isn’t impossible to produce an AI version of your watercolor, it is just more difficult, as you would have to make sure you put each separate color on its own layer, in order to vectorize each color layer to preserve that color differentiation. This is a long process, and it seems many that attempt this limit the number of colors they use, due to the amount of time this takes. As for certain layers that won’t “image trace” very well, because they are too light, each of those layers would have to be converted to black, then image traced to be placed on the new AI image you are creating from the raster/pixel based format. I have watched a few Elizabeth Silver YouTube videos on this subject. The that particularly stands out is one entitled “My Surface Pattern Design Workflow: Procreate to Adobe Illustrator”. She also mentions a successful watercolor surface designer by the name of Nicole Tamarin, so she would be worth looking up if you have more textured, color varied art.
I hope this information helps! Feel free to drop me a question in the comments and we’ll dig into it!
