How to Discover Profitable Design Trends Before Anyone Else – and Create Artwork with Mass Appeal
Cat Coquillette · Artist + Entrepreneur + Educator
A working six-figure licensing artist walks through her actual trend-spotting process, but the class runs light on repeatable technique.
Cat Coquillette teaches this class from a position most instructors covering trend forecasting cannot claim: she has licensed artwork to Target, Urban Outfitters, and HomeGoods, sold over a million printed products, and built a six-figure income partly by predicting which visual motifs would break out before they did. That credibility carries the course. The alpaca watercolor she painted on a whim in Peru, which then rode a 2015 home decor trend to become one of her top ten bestselling designs years later, does more to explain the payoff of early trend adoption than any slide of statistics could.
What the course actually covers
The eleven lessons move through a logical arc: why trends matter commercially, how to track them in general, then category-specific deep dives into color, texture and pattern, lettering, and motifs, before closing with a tools roundup, a list of blogs and accounts to follow, and a lesson on keeping your own style intact while chasing what sells. The strongest conceptual piece is the trend lifecycle model in lesson three: a trend gets introduced at high price points by fashion houses, gets mass-produced at moderate prices, plateaus, then declines, sometimes becoming a durable "classic" that resurfaces later. Paired with the macro-versus-micro distinction (cloud computing and urbanization as slow multi-year shifts, avocado toast and fidget spinners as viral flashes), it gives a real framework for deciding whether something is worth building a piece around.
The category lessons are more list than method. Color trend tracking amounts to naming sources: Pantone's color of the year, Shutterstock's pixel-data color reports, New York Fashion Week runway palettes. The lettering lesson is largely a roll call of typographers to follow on Instagram (Jessica Hische, Louise Fili, Gemma O'Brien) plus a tip to use WhatTheFont on a screenshot when you spot an unfamiliar typeface in the wild. The motif lesson explains how to scan a retailer's gift section, using ModCloth as the example, for repeated icons like sloths and unicorns. These sections are honest about where she personally looks for inspiration, but they read as a curated bookmarks folder rather than a taught skill.
Where it delivers and where it thins out
The Pinterest-to-Photoshop color palette exercise is the one genuinely hands-on technique in the course: pull an image you like, extract its palette, and match those hex values onto your own illustration in progress. It is simple, immediately usable, and the kind of thing a student can do the same day. The closing lesson on infusing personal style into trend-driven work, using her cheetah paintings and jungle-cat trend timing as the example, is also worth sitting with, since it addresses the real risk of chasing trends into generic, interchangeable output.
Where the course falls short is depth of execution. At 67 minutes across eleven lessons, most sections amount to a few minutes of "here is where I look and here is an example," with the class project asking students to submit color palettes and font screenshots rather than a fully executed on-trend piece. There is no walkthrough of how she actually translates a spotted trend into a finished, licensable design beyond the general encouragement to keep her recognizable style. Anyone hoping to reverse-engineer her actual production process will come away with a sharper eye for spotting patterns in the market and a starter list of resources, but not a repeatable system for turning that awareness into finished, sellable art.
The standout
The trend lifecycle framework, illustrated with her own alpaca paintings hitting the market right before a 2015-2016 spike, gives a genuinely transferable model for judging whether a trend is worth chasing or already too late.
What you will learn
- How to read the four-stage trend lifecycle (introduction, mass adoption, plateau, decline) and time an entry point
- How to tell macro-trends (multi-year, industry-shifting) apart from micro-trends (viral, short-lived) and treat them differently
- Which color-forecasting sources to check (Pantone, Shutterstock's pixel-data reports, New York Fashion Week) and how to fold them into a client pitch
- A concrete workflow for pulling a color palette from a Pinterest image and matching it in Photoshop
- How to identify an unfamiliar font from a screenshot using WhatTheFont or the Font Squirrel Matcherator
- How to scan retail sites like ModCloth and Anthropologie for recurring motifs as a trend-spotting shortcut
Best for: Working illustrators or surface designers who already sell art commercially and want a sharper process for choosing what to make next.
Skip it if: Total beginners looking for drawing, painting, or software instruction, since the class assumes you can already produce finished artwork and focuses purely on what to make.