Are you trying to prevent white lines in your exports from Adobe Illustrator but don’t know how to go about it? Do you wish you knew what was even causing them in the first place? This post will make the process so easy to understand! I’ll explain what causes those white seams in your Adobe Illustrator exports and how to fix them. No matter your comfort level with Adobe Illustrator, this video will make the process of preventing white seams straightforward and easy.

Video: How to Fix White Lines in Illustrator

Are you trying to prevent white lines in your exports from Adobe Illustrator but don't know how to go about it? Do you wish you knew what was even causing them in the first place? This post will make the process so easy to understand!

Hello! Today I want to help solve on of the biggest frustrations out there for surface pattern designers… the dreaded white lines you get when you export a pattern tile from illustrator. I’ve seen hundreds of different tips and tricks for fixing it involving various ways of exporting your tile, but what if we could prevent them from happening at all!? I’m happy to say I have finally cracked it!

Solved: What Causes White Lines in Illustrator?

To prevent them, we first need to understand what is actually going on. I’ve never fully understand why, but Illustrator incorrectly interprets the pixels on the very edge of the artboard when you export something. A clue to what is going in can be found here. You might have spotted that these daisies don’t have that same white gap, but the background does.

Are you trying to prevent white lines in your exports from Adobe Illustrator but don't know how to go about it? Do you wish you knew what was even causing them in the first place? This post will make the process so easy to understand!

If we go back into our illustrator file, you’ll see that the daisies all extend past the edges of the artboard, but the background doesn’t.

Are you trying to prevent white lines in your exports from Adobe Illustrator but don't know how to go about it? Do you wish you knew what was even causing them in the first place? This post will make the process so easy to understand!

During the export process, Illustrator is converting a vector image into pixels.

Instead of exporting what is literally there, i.e. pink all the way to the edge, it does some kind of filtering and looking at the nearest neighbours, including where there are no pixels at all to then decide what these edge pixels should look like. Where we have the pattern carrying on past the edges, it’s fine.

But where it gets cut off at the edge has no pixel directly to the other side of it (which you’d think would be fine because it’s not part of the area we’ve selected to export!) but it’s frustratingly adding a bit of “nothing” to that edge pixel. With PNG it makes it semi-transparent, and with the JPG it doesn’t do transparency, so it’s just plain white.

Find out how to get around this and export perfect patterns without white lines in the video below, plus a quick hack for fixing your illustrator exported PNG patterns in Photoshop if they have white lines in them!

So now you know how to test your illustrator exported files for those white lines, how to quickly fix it photoshop for a PNG file and best of all, how to prevent it ever happening again!

Thank you for watching! If you found this video helpful then please consider subscribing and if you want to learn more hacks and tips just like this then join me over on Skillshare where I’m a Top Teacher and I have lots of classes packed with helpful content just like this. If you’re new to Skillshare, you can get 1 month for free when you use my link!

Have fun, stay creative and I will see you next time!