Design Registration in India: Protecting How Your Product Looks

When the thing that sets your product apart is how it looks — its silhouette, its surface pattern, its distinctive form — a registered design is the right that protects it. It's one of the most under-used IP rights in India, often overlooked by businesses that reach for patents or trademarks when a design registration would have been faster, cheaper, and exactly on point.

What a design registration protects

Under the Designs Act, 2000, a design is the features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornament, or composition of lines or colours applied to an article — judged solely by the eye. Critically, it protects appearance, not function. How the product works is a question for patents; how it looks is a question for designs.

What you can and can't register

• Must be new or original — not previously published or used anywhere before filing.
• Must be applied to an article and appeal to the eye.
• Cannot be a mere mechanical or functional feature dictated solely by function.
• Cannot include trademarks, property marks, or purely artistic works (which fall under copyright).

Classes — the Locarno system

Designs are filed under the Locarno Classification, which sorts articles by type (furniture, packaging, clothing, tools, and so on). You register a design for a specific class of article, so identifying the correct Locarno class is part of filing correctly.

The registration process

1. 1Search existing designs to check your design is genuinely new.
2. 2Prepare representations (clear views of the article from the necessary angles) and identify the Locarno class.
3. 3File the application with the Design Office along with the prescribed fee.
4. 4Examination — the office checks novelty and compliance, and may raise objections to respond to.
5. 5Registration — once accepted, the design is registered and published.

How long it lasts

A registered design is protected for 10 years from the date of registration, extendable by a further 5 years on payment of the renewal fee — a maximum of 15 years. As with every IP right, that extension depends on filing the renewal in time.

Why designs are worth the effort

Design registration is comparatively quick and inexpensive, and it gives you a clean, registered right to stop look-alikes — products that copy your distinctive appearance without infringing a patent or trademark. For consumer products, packaging, and hardware, it's often the most direct protection against knock-offs.

Keeping designs in the portfolio

Designs sit alongside your trademarks and patents as part of one IP estate, with their own registration and renewal dates. Novipra tracks registered designs in the same portfolio as your marks and patents — status, class, and the 10-plus-5-year renewal — so a design right is never the one that quietly lapses because it lived in a different file.