A plea for Surface Design Artists
Surface design is a primarily female trade in Digital Arts. Surface Designers create stationery, cards, wallpapers, textiles, and game textures. Creating the perfect pattern tile is complex; one needs a good eye, a perfect understanding of colours, and a lot of patience.
Because it’s a primarily female trade, it’s underpaid.
Surface design softwares, though, aren’t cheap. The Adobe suite, which has very basic, clunky tools for pattern design, will cost around 70 Euros a month. It’s a lot when you don’t make enough or no sales. Add the price of a high-end computer, and yes, your heart is breaking. It’s not sustainable.
We need better, more straightforward solutions. Many Surface Designers own iPads, which are cheap alternatives for creating. However, iPad apps need more tools for creating patterns. The best Apps, like Procreate or Photoshop, don’t have pattern tools at all. It’s a bit sobering to think there are costly tools like 3D paint or AI filters but no pattern repeats. A few apps will have repeat tools, but they fall short in the creative part, especially for bitmap /pixel art, and are often difficult to use.
What is needed shouldn’t be very difficult to code or implement. Software like Painter (Corel) or Photoshop (Adobe) already had pattern tools in the last century.
Here’s a pattern I made in Procreate for miniature textiles (it’s a thing).
There’s no way to test if it repeats properly (it's not). You need something to test the seams (borders) for the repeat. There are several kinds of repeats, but even the simpler one(in a grid), I can’t test.
The most basic thing would be a tool to test the pattern, like a Pattern fill. This means that one would add a pattern library, which could be memory-heavy, something that’s probably not very clever on an iPad. I’m not recommending it unless it comes with smart storage solutions.
Another solution would be an offset filter, like it exists already in Photoshop for 30ish years, like so:
It’s efficient, but one has to apply it to every layer or flatten the picture, which is either time-consuming or not very useful, as one needs layers to work on colourways.
My favourite solution is an old one, which already exists in Procreate 3D: seamless painting. When you paint on the border, it continues on the other side instead of being stopped. It’s an old solution that existed in Painter 30 years ago and was implemented clumsily in Photoshop a few years ago.
To use seamless painting, you need an option to visualise it.
It might be similar to code as the mirror/symmetry tool. It would look like this: the pattern is repeated several times, and every change in the seams is visible. A line delimits the original surface to see where you came from. A switch allows you to go from no-repeat to pattern repeat, like so:
While this tool may only partially meet the demands of professional textile design, it can serve as an effective way for these designers to sketch a tile.
It would be enough for stationery designers, wallpaper designers, and anything that needs a simple repeat, like 75% or more of pattern design texture artists. A simple tool like this would make their lives much more manageable.
A simple tool like this would allow thousands of artists to confidently and efficiently do their jobs.
This tool is not just a design aid. It's an empowerment tool. It would allow parent artists to work in the dark, while putting kids to sleep. It would enable young artists to earn while studying. It would support stay-at-home mothers, helping them make a living. In essence, it's a tool of empowerment, particularly for women artists.
Please, I beg you, implement it!