I used the techniques in this post from Spoon Graphics yesterday to create a pattern background for a poster design (an element of which is pictured above). I found the tutorial to be very informative. Two slight efficiency improvements occurred to me while working through the posted steps.

The First

The author instructs us to Group our objects and then Copy and Paste into a new location, aligning the objects as we go by zooming in on them and moving them into place. I found that using the outline preview made this step much easier because the objects I was trying to copy had strokes applied to them. Outline preview (which can be toggled by hitting Cmd+Y) removes all styling to reveal the basic structure of the shapes on a page. I found that aligning the objects with these simple thin black lines allowed for a much more precise alignment then moving them into place with strokes turned on.

The Second

The author suggests that we overlap existing elements with our copied elements in order to align everything. This alignment is what creates the repeating pattern effect. To do this he has us Select All and Copy everything, Lock the selected elements, then Paste the new elements into the document and align as described above, and, finally: delete the overlapping page elements.

This works, but I had trouble remembering which copied elements where overlapping. The trick is to delete only the elements that are overlapping the originals without accidentally getting rid of other elements. In order to make this easier to do, I suggest changing the stroke color (or fill color I suppose) on the copied elements and turning down the opacity. In the illustration, I have changed the outlines on the copied elements to blue and made them 50% transparent. Now, when these elements overlap the original elements it’s immediately clear which need to be deleted:

In this case, all of the black shapes are locked, so all i need to do is draw a Selection Box with the Black Arrow around the darker shapes in the center of the illustration and hit “delete.” Once this is done, Cmd+A will select all of the blue transparent shapes in one step where I can then return the transparency to 100% and change the stroke color back to black.

Note

The author of the original post uses a combination of strokes and fills to create his shapes. For cases such as this, and for cases with far more complicated shapes, you would want to turn down the transparencyon both sets of elements. If the original set is (for example) 50% transparent and the copied set is also 50% transparent, the overlapping elements will appear at 100% opacity and will be easy to select and delete. Remember to lock your original elements, or it will be impossible to get a quick, easy selection of the overlapped elements in order to delete them.

Transparency works as an efficient marker in this case because it is a change that can be made globally to all selected shapes and returned to the original settings in one easy step.