How To Create a Trendy Seamless Pattern in Illustrator The great thing about seamless repeating patterns is that once created, they can be used as a base for all kinds of awesome designs. Skateboard decks, custom apparel, package designs and website backgrounds are just some of the uses for the good old pattern swatch. Follow this tutorial to build a vector based repeating pattern of your own, featuring trendy graphics of skulls, stars, lightning bolts and other cool pop imagery. The pattern we'll be creating has a mono colour scheme of grey, white and black and features a bunch of cool graphics. Speech bubbles, skulls, crossbones, stars, drips, sprays and lightning bolts all help to add that urban/punk pop feel. Open up Adobe Illustrator. The first graphic we'll create is the speech bubble. Draw a perfect circle (hold Shift) and give it a black fill. Using the Pen tool, draw a pointed outline to simulate a typical speech bubble shape, overlap this with the main circle then select both objects and click the Unite option from the Pathfinder window to merge them both together. Use the Type tool to add some form of typographic symbol. Here I'm using a question mark set in VAG Rounded . Center up the mark by eye then group the two objects together. Next we'll start on a simple skull graphic. Draw an oval with a black fill and rotate it slightly. Use the Pen tool to draw the jaw of the skull, giving it