The art of replicating a real time object or a functional model of a system into a 2-dimensional platform for the understanding of the common man is an illustration, it becomes imminent to have an illustration in a patent application, and these are normally referred to as patent illustration, patent drawing, patent figures, and patent images etc.
The patent law demands that a patent application is to furnish at least one drawing, if at any point within the application it is capable to illustrate by way of a drawing, this can be taken as a huge advantage for an applicant to make it more convincingly acceptable to the examiner and the common person to understand and approve the idea, as the phrase suggest ?a picture can say a thousand words?, this is where we come in and focus our expertise to maximize this advantage to our and the applicants benefits.
A good patent illustration can make it easy for the patent drafting, and hence expediting the whole process, along the prosecution of the application as well. What we are saying is, illustration of an application is equally important if not more than that of a drafting of the application, and for which it requires the same amount of expertise, skill and diligence that a draft demands of an application.
If it is not in the drawings? it is not in the patent!
Yes, it is true beside the case of chemical compound or composition. It has been observed that all the other fields of invention have the capability of squeezing in a figure or two, which means probably the examiner will end up asking the applicant or the attorney to cough up a diagram to enable the crystal clear projection of the invention.
Most people can fully understand the invention by just looking at our drawings alone. Most people are picture oriented, rather than word orientated. They can understand an invention far more readily, from the patent illustrations. This is when a patent Illustrator needs to come in. A patent Illustrator is one who has the expertise and a great knowledge of visually representing structures, machinery, biological elements like the change in a DNA strand, and from many fields put together, an ability that is cultivated over the years, a will to convey minute details to a broad point of focus.
We take care of applicant’s invention and zero in on their point of novelty and inventive step that helps us magnify those attributes into our drawings. A patent drawing needs to convey each elements of the invention as mentioned in the description, so that to properly enable the disclosure with clarity, that also means the important elements needs to be detailed in a way, so that neither they should not be missed out in larger details of the drawings, nor they should be missed out. in the actual written description.
It is quite possible that an invention has multiple point of focuses that enable the invention to stand on the ground of patentability, but we cannot deny that a patent drafter may never forget a thing from all those many enabling points which may lead to be a potential disqualification of a patent, but keeping a patent illustration from an expert illustrator who has also taken up to his/her understanding of the invention will include those missed out points.
Eventually, a drawing will save all the applicant and the inventor’s aspirations. A competent patent illustrator always advise and follow the territorial guidelines provided by their Patent Offices. Additionally, patent Examiners will review the drafting for compliance with the regulations of their own offices.
The USPTO, EPO & IPO all have regulations, more or less the same. However, we are enabled to take up the Patent Illustration work of almost any other jurisdiction including, SIPO, JPO, KIPO, ETC. We take utmost care while illustrating figures of Patent applications to bring out the inventive step and the enabling points of an invention, and only the diagrams that are required by the patent application after deeply discussing the same with the Patent Attorney, inventors or the applicant as the case may be.
Additionally, as part of our quality processes, we also give due focus to identify certain inconsistencies that an IP attorney might miss, which definitely helps in reducing down office actions. For an appropriate and acceptable Patent Drawings, guidelines should be religiously followed, which may vary a bit across the jurisdictions, and a experienced illustrator keeps in mind which all countries the application may be applied to, and takes a composite approach to reach a required standard and guideline, so that the future re-work should be reduced to maximum extent and minimal office actions shall be received for the drawings re-work.Of course, that means a substantial time and cost saving.
