The pattern synthesis for large antenna arrays is very important because of its wide applications. Several antenna array synthesis techniques for planar antenna array have been developed in the past years. In this paper, a hybrid method for solving antenna array pattern synthesis problem is introduced. The proposed method has three steps. Firstly, the iterative fast Fourier transforms (IFT) is used to generate a number of initial array excitations based on aim pattern. Then, the global optimization method differential evolution strategy (DES) is used to optimize these excitations based on initial excitations. After that, if the optimized pattern does not satisfy the goal, the simulated annealing (SA) method is applied to optimize the excitations until the goal is achieved or the maximum iteration is reached. Several simulation results show that the desired pattern can be effectively synthesized by using the proposed method.