Many of you ask why you should learn to design surface print patterns in Photoshop when you already know how to make them in Illustrator.

Others ask, What on earth is a 'repeat' and do I really need to know how to make one to become a professional print pattern or surface designer?

Our lovely Longina Phillips Designs designer, Phoebe, clears it all up in this week's vlog.

Why use Photoshop?

As a studio, we use Photoshop as it allows our designers to have the most creative freedom when it comes to editing and manipulating their prints.

When do we use Illustrator?

So a good time to use Illustrator is when you want to create vector-based artworks. So they are shapes that use points and anchors instead of pixels. So it means that they are infinitely scalable. So a good time to use Illustrated would be if you're doing a Pucci print or maybe you're doing a Geo print that you don't know what the scale of it might be. So it could be put on a billboard. And in that case,...

Whenever you need to elevate a design, textures are an easy option. They can add interest and authenticity to the simplest composition and bring it bang up to date.

In the Longina Phillips Designs studio we have an enormous digital library of pre-made textures.  It’s an essential resource for the designers on our team and we dip into it daily!

Whether you are starting your texture library from scratch or building upon an already well-furnished folder, check out creative director, Bec's suggestions for using texture in 2023.

1. Tie-dye

You can get so much mileage from a few tie-dye textures. Cut them up, make new variations of them, and create more stylized tie-dye designs like the Ulla Johnson pre-fall examples. Or strip them back and use them as a non-print print for a more sophisticated market, home, or menswear (Scotch and soda).

Clockwise from Top: Ulla Johnson, Raquel Allegra, Scotch...

What even is a repeating pattern? It’s a design that stretches seamlessly for infinity, just like the design on a roll of fabric. And if you’d like to become a surface print pattern designer, then it’s one of the most important skills to learn. 

Tutorial by Lyndsay, Senior Designer

Here we break it down for you in 5 easy steps.  

1. Place your hero

Start by creating a bunch layout in the centre of your art board. Make sure there’s some bare canvas around it.

2. Duplicate and place over-hanging motifs

You can see that this flower is hanging off our canvas at the bottom so to make this repeat work, it will need to reappear that the top of the canvas.

To do this, duplicate the motif then use the x and Y axis in the toolbar to move it north exactly the length of the canvas. This canvas is 64cm, so you’ll see me type -64 into the Y axis to move the motif 64cm exactly north.

TIP: Make sure that the triangle in...

Words by Lyndsay, Creative Lead and Senior Designer.

Struggling to create at a commercially viable pace? You’re not alone. Keeping productivity high in the fast-paced world of fabric design is a daily challenge, even for those of us who have been in the game for years. 

But, while we Longina Phillips Designs designers can sometimes find it hard to fly through a brief, we have one important ace up our sleeve: Adobe Photoshop training. Or, more specifically, certain skills that help us complete a job much faster than when following textbook (aka. more longwinded) processes.  

Fellow designer Steph and I recently sat down with our lovely social media coordinator, Morgan to chat about pace and productivity and the Adobe Photoshop training that has helped speed our work the most.

Morgan: When you first started in the fashion industry, did you find the expectations to finish designs quickly quite shocking?

Lyndsay: For sure. I remember being at university...