As part of a multi-faceted campaign around the milestone issuance of patent 10,000,000, we developed a three-block sidewalk display to illustrate the history of patents and the evolution of patent cover designs. 

The display acted as a timeline of important moments, notable inventors, and changing patent designs over more than two centuries of American innovation. For three months, 16 large-scale sidewalk decals were placed along a thousand feet of high-traffic sidewalk leading from the nearby Metro station to the USPTO's Alexandria, Virginia headquarters.

Our goals for the project included:

- Providing a tangible, real-world way for USPTO employees, visitors, and surrounding community to learn about patent 10 million

- Engaging the local community in the history and importance of American innovation and increasing visibility of USPTO’s mission

- Strengthening collaborations between the USPTO, the City of Alexandria, and other neighbors

The project was highly successful. On any given morning, you could step outside and see people slowly making their way up the street as they read the details of each large-format graphic. The collection was a highly visible neighborhood amenity that effectively spread the word about the USPTO's long history in American innovation, and shared some seldom-seen design artifacts from historic patent covers.

By a wide margin, this was the largest-scale exhibit ever created by the agency, and it helped lay the groundwork with the agency and local partners for future high-visibility projects on our campus.

While the project was fairly straightforward from a design and technical standpoint, it did make use of a large collection of drawings extracted from historic patent documents. Since the artwork is archived as 1-bit graphics of moderate resolution, all of it was traced into vector format in Illustrator in order to reproduce it successfully at large scale.