The Easy Way to Make a Seamless Pattern in Adobe Illustrator and Install it in Blogger.

I used to make all of my blog backgrounds about 1600px X 1000px, which is all good....  but I hated it when I would look at my designs on my dad's 30in monitor and I would see all that nasty white space on the sides of my beautiful designs.

Hopefully with this simple tutorial, I can get you hooked on seamless patterns as backgrounds.  Not only are they simple to make, and oh so lovely, the go on forever and ever, no nasty white space.  Oh, and don't let me forget, they are smaller in file size, therefore, they will show up quicker when you are loading your page.

So on to the tutorial!  This is going to be the first of 2 tutorials, and this one is the UBER EASY way to do it.  We are going to take a dingbat font (this is "Davys" that I found at fontsquirrel.com) and make that into our seamless pattern.

Making a Post Signature in Adobe Illustrator

I wanted to start this week off with a simple tutorial, so we are making a Custom Signature.  The fun thing about this tutorial, is that I am going to show you how to alter your font and so that your Signature can be even more personalized than just a cute font alone.  I am using Illustrator CS5, but you can use any version that you have (nothing in this tutorial requires CS5).

First I am going to make a new document.  I am sizing mine at 100px high by 175px wide.

Tutorial: How to make a custom designed background that can change colors easily.

I don't know if any of you run into this with your clients, but occasionally I will get a client that wants the flexibility to change the color of their background, but they don't want the background to be a plain color.  I thought that I would share my little trick to make this work.  I hope you can use it in your designs :)

Step #1:  Make or use a background or a seamless pattern for your background.  The key is that you need to take your background and make it white, with a transparent background.  I made this simple dot pattern in Adobe Illustrator (it works the same in Photoshop if you choose to use that).