Holiday Wrapping Paper Roll Problem - how to get it to tile seamlessly?

[one-bad-meme]

I've noticed this not only with my own wrapping paper rolls but with pretty much every other non-stripe pattern i've seen. It will not tile seamlessly. I can't figure out what size i'd need it to be in order to get it tile right. This is nuts! I don't feel it should be this hard to make a product that doesn't look... well, awful.

Some examples below. All my own art - but look around for yourself. When you click on it to see the full roll... it's cut off!

[one-bad-meme]

More examples.

(edit to add: note that you have to click on the preview image to see what the roll looks like when it's unrolled. the point of this problem I'm pointing out is that it seems impossible to get it actually tile for entire roll)

[Cat]

Can you post links to the products? It's hard to tell exactly what's going on from the pictures.

[ColsCreations]

Using the Design Placement option of "Horizontal", the design area you're working on in the Design Tool represents 30" high by 36" long (3 feet).
That entire 3 foot design is repeated horizontally to make whatever roll length the customer orders.
The minimum roll length a customer can buy is 6 feet, so your design would be strung together horizontally twice.
For a 15 foot roll, it would be strung together 5 times and so on.
Here's a guide design I made a while back to visualize the size of the design area. Each square in my grid is one inch. Note the left & right edges highlighted in yellow & purple and how they meet up in the Seam preview. That should help visualize what needs to be done to a design to make it seamless for the length of the whole roll.

If you instead use the Design Placement option of "Tile", the design area you're working on in the Design Tool represents only 6" high by 6" long. (Guide design here.) That 6" x 6" is repeated six times across the 36" section that is then repeated however many times to make up the roll length the customer orders.

There are use-cases for both, which you choose depends on the overall design you're trying to achieve for the minimum 6-foot roll, but this should help you visualize things.

[ColsCreations]

In case anyone wonders what the blue, pink and green squares are there for, it's because I was trying to pinpoint which area in the design canvas was the focal point of my preferred in situ preview.

Horizontal Placement - Wrapping Paper

[Sara_H]

@one-bad-meme Have a read of the help section with how to tile wrapping paper - https://help.zazzle.com/hc/en-us/articles/9563610433943-Tiling-How-to-Create-Repeating-Patterns-

"To get clean seams where one panel ends and the next one starts, use tile size widths that are whole number factors of 36 (for example: 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, or 36). "

[1234Shine]

I am not a technical person in any way.  My guess is because each print area for the rolling wrapping paper is 36"(w) x 30"(h),  so after 36" in width, the print job just repeats the same first 36"x30".

[one-bad-meme]

Yes I agree, much more elegantly put than what I said lol. This seems like a big problem though as not all patterns just fit in that size and tile, and there's no indication with the design creator if your pattern is tiling the full sheet or not, it's weird guesswork that just doesn't end up working out for me. I think it's something that should be fixed by Zazzle but I'm hoping maybe some experienced Zazzle designers might have some tips for me to get it to tile better in the meantime.

[Cat]

I was having similar problems until @Sara_H graciously pointed me to this help file: Tiling (How to Create Repeating Patterns) – Zazzle Help Center The key piece of info for me was that once you tile something you can change the tile size and it changes the size of all the grouped elements inside the tile (assuming you're grouping elements). There's no other way that I know of to control the size numerically inside of the design tool. I know it works if you enter a smaller size than your tile natively works out to, not sure about entering a larger one - I think that might just increase the space between tiles. 

Anyhow, I had to use boxes inside of boxes to get things to line up correctly, but here's an example of what I came up with: Watercolor Pine Trees 2 Photo Merry Christmas Wrapping Paper | Zazzle If you enter the editor, un-tile it and change the background color you can see more clearly what I did. It's a pretty rudimentary design, but it did help me to understand the concepts.

And if you're using artwork as a repeating tile, you need to make sure that the artwork is already seamless - the design tool won't do that part for you.

Hope my blatherings make a little bit of sense!

[one-bad-meme]

That article is quite helpful! Particularly this bit:

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When Layers->Design Placement is set to “Tile”, it’s best to use tile size settings 6"x6", 3"x3", 2"x2", or 1"x1" for clean repetition of your design element throughout the entire pattern.

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I will be doing just that. Thank you!!

[Windy]

I cannot tell if you are already using the Design Placement Settings control (found in the Layers panel of the design tool) to choose tile rather than horizontal. If not, choosing tile there may solve your problem. 

[Windy]

As an example of using the tile option in the design placement settings, using that is how I avoided the seam on this roll of paper. 

Swedish Gnome Christmas
by WINDYDESIGN