How Design Patents Protect the Appearance of a Product

Design patent protection is widely used by inventors and businesses to prevent plagiarism and other forms of infringement. Part of what it protects is the visual appearance of the product but not exactly about how the product works. It protects features such as the shape, configuration, surface ornamentation, or a combination of these elements. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) explains that a design must be new, original, and ornamental to qualify for design patent protection.

Demand for design patent protection has remained significant in the United States. In 2025, the USPTO also changed how design patent applications could receive expedited review. After suspending its expedited examination procedure for design applications in April, the agency formally eliminated the procedure effective August 14, 2025.

According to the USPTO, requests for expedited examination had increased by 560% in recent years, contributing to a growing examination workload and longer wait times for design applicants. But are there limitations on the designs to be patented? What cannot be patented?

Let’s take a closer look at how design patents protect the appearance of a product.

Appearance, Not Function

The USPTO puts it in one sentence: that a utility patent protects the way an article is used and works, while a design patent protects the way an article looks. The same product can carry both.

A chair with a new reclining mechanism and a distinctive silhouette has two separate things worth protecting, and they are examined under different rules by different examiners.

The Office’s design patent application guide describes a design as the visual ornamental characteristics embodied in or applied to an article of manufacture and states that where the appearance is purely dictated by function, meaning no alternative design could have served the same function, the design lacks ornamentality.

The Drawings Are the Claim

A design application carries a single claim, and the guide points to the rule requiring exactly that.

What the claim covers gets settled by the figures rather than by paragraphs of description. Solid lines show the claimed design. Broken lines show structure that is not part of it but is there for context, and the specification has to say so explicitly.

The claim must be complete in solid lines to obtain narrow protection, for all that needs to be done by a competitor is to alter one visible aspect. A single surface or a contour can be claimed with everything else being left incomplete to achieve a greater scope of protection for the patent, as it covers more products using that particular feature.

Preparing one of these is drawing work as much as legal work. Bold IP, PLLC, which does business as Bold Patents, offers design patent application services that treat the figures as the most effective description of the design itself, whether they arrive as a hand-drawn sketch, a computer-drafted illustration, or a black-and-white photograph, and the page also takes up international recognition through the Hague System for the International Registration of Industrial Designs.

Fifteen Years and No Renewal Bills

The term is fixed at the start. MPEP 1505 states that patents issued from design applications filed on or after May 13, 2015, are granted for fifteen years from the date of grant, with a fourteen-year term applying to applications filed before that date. There is no extension mechanism of the sort utility patents have and no term adjustment for examination delay.

MPEP 2504 states that maintenance fees are not required for any plant patents or for any design patents. A utility patent has to be filed at three and a half, seven and a half, and eleven and a half years after grant. A design patent, once granted, runs its term with nothing further owed.

The Validity Test Moved in 2024

Anyone relying on a design patent granted a few years back should know the ground moved underneath it.

In LKQ Corporation v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC, decided en banc on May 21, 2024, the Federal Circuit overruled the Rosen-Durling requirements that a primary reference be basically the same as the challenged design and that secondary references be so related that features in one would suggest their use in the other.

For a product company, the practical sequence has not changed much. Decide what part of the look is worth owning, get the figures drawn properly at the scope you actually want, and file before the design has been out in the world long enough for the question to get complicated. The paperwork is modest next to what a distinctive shape is worth once people start recognizing it on a shelf.

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Kevin is an attorney and the blogger behind Financial Panther, a blog about personal finance, travel hacking, and side hustling using the gig economy. He paid off $87,000 worth of student loans in just 2.5 years by choosing not to live like a big shot lawyer.

Kevin is passionate about earning money using the gig economy and you can see all the ways he makes extra income every month in his side hustle reports.

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Feel free to send Kevin a message here.