The Indian Designs Office’s draft GUI Guidelines mark an important step following the Calcutta High Court’s decision in NEC Corporation v. Controller of Patents on the registrability of GUIs. Harshita Bhola writes on the Guidelines, noting that while they are a welcome improvement that could bring greater consistency and predictability to examination practices, the proposed requirement to submit separate representations of individual frames risks overlooking the creative contribution underlying an animation. Harshita Bhola is a 7th-semester B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, GGSIPU, with research interests in intellectual property, technology law, and legal policy.
Can an Animation Be a Design? Examining India’s Draft GUI and Icon Design Guidelines, 2026
By Harshita Bhola
On 1 October 2026, the Indian Designs Office published the Draft Guidelines for Registration of Designs Relating to GUI & ICON etc., inviting comments from stakeholders within thirty days. As a student of law, I consider the draft a constructive development, as it seeks to replace inconsistent examination practice with a predictable framework. Its treatment of animated interfaces, however, raises a question that deserves careful scrutiny before the guidelines are finalised: where a designer creates a single animation, should the applicant be required to treat each of its frames as a separate design?
Legal Status of the Draft
It is necessary to clarify at the outset that the draft is administrative guidance and not legislation. It does not amend the Designs Act, 2000; it operates within the framework of that Act and the Designs Rules, 2001, and it acknowledges that the statute and the Rules prevail in the event of any inconsistency. Its purpose is to promote uniformity in examination, not to alter the scope of what is registrable.
Judicial and Administrative Background
For many years, applications for GUIs were refused on the reasoning that an interface is visible only while a device is switched on and consequently cannot be regarded as an “article” within the meaning of Section 2(a). Practice was nevertheless inconsistent, and some GUIs were registered under Class 14-04 or Class 14-99.
The position changed materially on 9 March 2026, when the Calcutta High Court, in NEC Corporation v. Controller of Patents, observed that the Act contains no requirement of “permanence”, and held that GUIs cannot be excluded merely because they are digital, and must instead be examined on a case-by-case basis. The Court cautioned that a narrow interpretation would mean GUIs, icons and animations never being registered, and it remanded the matters for fresh consideration. The draft guidelines may reasonably be understood as the administrative response to that judgment.
The Article Requirement
Consistently with the statutory scheme, the draft provides that a GUI, an icon or a graphic symbol cannot be claimed in isolation, whereas formulations such as “Mobile Phone with GUI”, “Computer Monitor with GUI” or “Smart Watch with GUI” are potentially admissible. The draft further recognises that visibility only when a device is powered on does not, by itself, prevent registration, which accords with the High Court’s reasoning.
The Treatment of Animated GUIs
The draft expressly recognises dynamic, animated, sequential and transitional GUIs as potentially admissible, provided that representations of each relevant frame are filed separately. To appreciate the difficulty this may cause, consider a button which, on being touched, expands into a circular menu through a 24-frame animation. The first frame, showing the button, may be entirely ordinary, and the final frame, showing the open menu, may be equally so. The creative contribution of the designer nevertheless lies in the transition connecting them, that is, in the manner in which the first state becomes the second.
It would be inaccurate to conclude that the draft requires twenty-four applications for such an animation, since it does not say so expressly and its own illustration concerns only two frames. The language does, however, create a degree of uncertainty which, in a compliance setting, carries real cost: an applicant cannot reliably estimate whether one filing or many will be required, and an examiner has no settled basis for deciding what should be compared with the prior art. More fundamentally, if each frame is assessed only as a static image, the law may fail to capture the very feature in which the design resides. The issue is therefore one concerning the object of protection, and not merely the number of filings.
Comparative Practice
Other jurisdictions provide a useful point of reference. Under the common practice of European offices, a sequence of snapshots may be used to show a single animated design at successive moments, provided that all the views are visually related. Since 1 July 2026, the EU system has additionally permitted up to ten static views, or a single animated representation, for each design, a reform regarded as particularly suitable for GUIs, although it may complicate priority claims where other jurisdictions do not recognise it. India need not adopt this model in full, but the underlying principle, namely that an animation may constitute one design expressed through several views, merits serious consideration.
A Proposed Framework
The Designs Rules already contemplate multiple representations of a design under Rules 11 and 14. Rules 11 and 14 of the Designs Rules, 2001, collectively mandate that an application must be accompanied by four identical copies of the design representation, which may consist of drawings, photographs, tracings, or computer graphics executed on durable, single-sided A4 white paper. The final guidelines could accordingly clarify that several frames may constitute one coherent design where they form a continuous visual concept. In such cases, the applicant would be required to identify the article on which the GUI is displayed, to furnish a sufficient number of representative key frames, to explain the sequence or transformation, to specify the visual features claimed as novel, to distinguish functional features from aesthetic ones, and to supply additional frames wherever clarity so demands. Separate applications would remain appropriate where particular frames display independent novelty or amount to materially different designs. Such a framework would protect the designer’s actual creation while preserving the reliability of the public register.
Issues for Consultation
In the submissions, stakeholders may wish to address five questions.
First, regarding the unit of protection, the response must reject the individual frame as the baseline. Protecting isolated frames fails to capture the designer’s actual creation, which resides in the motion. Conversely, protecting only the overall sequence might allow competitors to bypass infringement by altering a single frame. Therefore, the unit of protection should be a combination of the sequence and the transition. This aligns with the post’s core argument that the creative contribution lies in the manner in which the first state becomes the second.
Second, to achieve sufficient disclosure without administrative bloat, representative keyframes should suffice, provided they are accompanied by a clear textual description of the movement. While the EU system’s reliance on digital files is progressive, India’s current framework under Rules 11 and 14 can be effectively utilized by mandating a visual timeline of the transition’s start, midpoint, and end states, ensuring the public register remains reliable and clear.
Third, to distinguish a single coherent design from multiple independent ones, the guidelines should implement a “continuous visual concept” test. If the sequence of frames flows from a single user trigger (like the button expanding into a menu) and maintains visual continuity in color, geometry, and asset styling, it constitutes a single design. (something similar to what’s been prescribed in the UK Designs Practice note) If a frame introduces an independent functional state or an unrelated visual theme, the examiner should require separate applications.
Fourth, applicants should state novelty through a structured disclaimer that explicitly isolates the transition or sequence from the underlying static elements. This can be incorporated into the GUI Design Guidelines as a prescribed model for the Statement of Novelty and accompanying visual disclaimers, clarifying which static elements are excluded and which features of the depicted transition are claimed, while any change to mandatory filing requirements should be made through amendments to the Designs Rules. If the button itself is ordinary, the applicant must disclaim the static shape and explicitly claim the novel dynamic transformation, ensuring examiners know exactly what feature is being assessed against the prior art.
Fifth, to modernize examination methodologies, the Indian Designs Office must move away from searches confined to static screenshots. Examiners should adopt a hybrid search protocol combining metadata keyword indexing of dynamic terms (e.g., “expanding circular transition”) with open-source digital repository checks. This ensures that prior animations are not overlooked simply because their static starting points appear ordinary.
Conclusion
The draft guidelines represent a significant step towards recognising GUIs as registrable designs where the statutory requirements are satisfied. The treatment of animation, however, requires closer attention. The objective should not merely be to make animated GUIs registrable, but to establish a filing and examination system that reflects what an animated design actually is: not twenty-four unrelated interfaces, but a single visual concept expressed across successive states. Indian design law was framed in an era dominated by physical products, and the appropriate response to digital interfaces is not to abandon its established principles but to apply them thoughtfully to a design that moves.
