Art Licensing for Surface Pattern designers
Mel Armstrong · Illustrator, Pattern Addict & Teacher
Thirty-three minutes of practical outreach advice for pattern designers who already have a portfolio but no idea how to sell it.
"Art Licensing for Surface Pattern Designers" is a short, practical briefing rather than a deep course. Across seven brief lessons and roughly half an hour, Mel Armstrong walks through the outreach side of licensing: getting noticed, finding contacts, customizing a pitch, understanding contracts, and keeping clients once they say yes. It assumes a finished portfolio and existing pattern collections. Anyone still learning to design patterns is pointed elsewhere, since that skill is treated as a prerequisite, not a topic here.
What it actually covers
The course opens with a readiness checklist: a website, a portfolio, a social media presence, and a working knowledge of licenses and contracts. From there it moves into visibility tactics that read as lived experience rather than theory, citing specific channels like Instagram, Pinterest, the weekly Spoonflower Challenge, and a monthly free desktop wallpaper giveaway that once led to a New York hotel wallpaper commission. The email and snail mail sections are similarly concrete, down to advice on attaching low resolution mockups, using a private Dropbox showcase link, and following up only once or twice after a cold email.
The contact-finding lesson is the strongest stretch. It shows how to locate a company's official submissions page, an approach demonstrated with the Robert Kaufman fabric website, and how a simple Google search for a job title and company name often surfaces an art director's LinkedIn profile directly. This is the kind of unglamorous, replicable legwork that separates a course with real utility from one that just repeats motivational advice.
The portfolio customization lesson is thinner but useful, recommending collections of five to ten patterns tailored to the target company's product category, paired with a warning against sending irrelevant mockups, like a shoe design pitched to a water bottle brand.
Where it falls short
The contracts and licensing lesson is the weakest part of the course given how central it is to the title. It defines what a license should contain, product, territory, term length, royalty rate, and advance, but it explicitly avoids discussing pricing, deferring to a different book and a different instructor's class entirely. For a course positioned around licensing, sending viewers elsewhere for the one topic that determines whether a license is actually worth signing is a real gap, not just a scoping choice.
The course also leans heavily on personal anecdote in place of structured method. Advice arrives as a sequence of things that worked for the instructor, Instagram tags, a spreadsheet of contacts, a newsletter split into two lists, rather than as a system a beginner could follow step by step without adaptation. There are no downloadable templates beyond a worksheet mentioned for listing target companies, and no example contract to study.
Verdict
This works well as a compact orientation for someone who already makes patterns and needs a nudge and a checklist to start pitching companies. It does not function as a legal or pricing reference, and viewers hoping to learn contract negotiation or royalty math will need to look elsewhere despite the title's promise.
The standout
The walkthrough of finding an art director's name and contact details through a company's submissions page and a targeted LinkedIn search gives a repeatable, concrete prospecting method most beginners never think to use.
What you will learn
- How to build a readiness checklist covering website, portfolio, social presence and licensing knowledge before approaching companies
- How to use Instagram, Pinterest, competitions and a website blog to get discovered by art directors
- How to find art director contact details through company submission pages, LinkedIn searches and trade shows
- How to customize a five to ten pattern collection to fit a specific company's aesthetic before pitching
- What core terms belong in a licensing contract, including territory, term length, royalty rate and advance
- How to follow up on outreach and maintain client relationships through newsletters and periodic check-ins
Best for: Surface pattern designers who already have a body of work and a portfolio and are ready to pitch companies but don't know how to find or approach them.
Skip it if: Anyone still learning to design patterns or collections, since the teacher explicitly points elsewhere for that and assumes a finished portfolio here.