Issue with strokes switching orientation in Illustrator CC

Question

I designed a logo in Illustrator CC. Everything looks fine until I zoom out. When I reach 33.33% the areas with the fine strokes change orientation, they reverse (these were created from clipping masks that I expanded then cropped). Here is what it looks at 100% and 33.33%:

I found out that there was reports of similar issues with High Sierra, which is the operating system that I had: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-bugs/suggestions/20384572-high-sierra-macos-10-13-gpu-rendering-issues-wit So I unchecked the GPU performance setting and tried switching my file to cmyk but it didn't change anything. I even upgraded to Mojave and updated all of my Creative Cloud softwares (I now have Illustrator CC 23.0.1)), still have the same issue.

Anybody has experienced this before and know how to fix it? This logo needs to be delivered ASAP and it is seriously starting to stress me out. This issue (with that same logo, this is the only vector I encountered this problem with) also happens in photoshop when I export it as a smart object. If the file is high res and big there is no problem but as soon as try reducing the size the strokes reversed. I tried in InDesign, with saving out as jpg, png, pdf,... same thing happens.

Could it be a pixel related problem and/or the way I designed it? When I go under View and check Pixel Preview it automatically reverse the strokes. I did try to Align to pixel grid but then it distort the logo like this:

Any help I can receive will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You have just discovered aliasing. Its either this or blurring the hell out of the image. You are just at the cusp of Nyquist rate. Is there anything you can do? Well, you can make your pattern a bit bigger on small sizes, use higher sample counts and blurr the thing slightly or you can paint them manually.

There is no real solution just different tradeofs.