As of July 2026, the EU design system has introduced a welcome and highly practical change: applicants can now submit up to 10 static views per design, compared with the previous limit of seven views.
While this may appear to be a relatively minor procedural amendment, it is likely to have a meaningful impact on the efficiency and cost of obtaining design protection in Europe.
Reduced Administrative Effort, Lower Costs and Greater Legal Certainty
In many jurisdictions around the world, applicants routinely use up to ten views to show the various aspects of a claimed design. As a result, priority applications are often prepared using ten drawings, for example to show different perspectives of the product.
Under the previous EU rules, applicants claiming priority from such filings frequently had to reduce the number of views before filing the corresponding EU design application. This additional step required careful consideration of which views could be omitted without affecting the overall disclosure of the design, for example by assessing whether important design features would remain adequately represented once certain views had been removed.
The change should therefore reduce the work and time required to prepare EU design applications, resulting in lower filing costs and a more streamlined filing process.
Importantly, the change may also provide greater certainty in relation to priority claims. By allowing applicants to use the same set of drawings in both the priority application and the subsequent EU design application, the risk of discrepancies between the two filings is reduced. The ability to file identical representations in both applications should make it easier to demonstrate that the EU design application relates to the same design as disclosed in the priority filing.
A Small Change with a Meaningful Impact
For businesses pursuing international design protection strategies, the amendment is therefore more than a procedural simplification. It removes an unnecessary filing hurdle, reduces costs and helps ensure greater consistency between priority and EU design filings.
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