Patent Drawings: Tips to Keep Costs Down

Providing your own drawings can be a good way to reduce some of the costs associated with drafting a patent application. However, providing unsuitable drawings will require them to be fixed by your attorney or a professional draughtsman and may end up costing you more.

Here are some tips for avoiding common pitfalls found in patent drawings:

• Patent drawings should be in black and white. The lines should be clean, black, sufficiently dense and dark, and uniformly thick and well-defined.
• Block shading in patent drawings is ideally avoided. Thin, spaced lines should be used instead.
• The drawings should contain minimal textual matter.
• It may help to provide your attorney with drawings which do not have any labelling (e.g., lead lines and references). The attorney may wish to decide which specific features to label and what to label them with as they draft the patent application. If they receive drawings with labels that are not needed, or references which are not applicable, they will have to spend time (and incur costs) removing these.

If you have any queries about your drawings, speak to your attorney and they will tell you exactly what they would expect to receive to keep their (or a draughtman’s) input to a minimum.

For more information on the requirements for patent drawings in the UK please see this UK Intellectual Property Office factsheet.