Show HN: Retro Patents – Tech patents turned into art | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Retro Patents – Tech patents turned into art

retropatents.com

86 pointsMikhus46 comments

I'd love these with one change: drop the text at the bottom! It would be so much more fun to just have the schematic and make my guests have to guess what the patent is for. More of a conversation piece that way.

Completely agreed. The schematics look great, and the text totally throws it off as an art piece.

Thanks for the feedback.

We actually split test this at the very start and the name variant won out. Seems like the majority of customers have a loyalty to the brand/product and preferred having the name.

I guess art is subjective and I can understand why you'd prefer it the other way. Cheers for the comments anyway!

So, maybe offer both styles?

Sounds like a reasonable thing to do - and it's just an additional checkbox on the website, so it's easy too!

Also potentially stocking twice as many items and increasing design work load.

This is my general reaction almost all t-shirts I see for sale.

I partially agree. I could live with the text, but the design is a little off. Text is a bit too big, and the font is not quite right.

As far as I am aware Patent Documents are public domain, and not subject to copyright, so if someone wanted a printed patent poster they could grab the document and take it to any large format printer and have it printed there cheaper than it would cost to order from retropatents.com, and they could do this for any patent they were interested in, not just the limited selection available at your store.

Does Retro Patents add anything unique? Or in other words, why should I order from Retro Patents instead of doing what I mentioned in the first paragraph?

You're right but we have spent a lot of time cleaning and tidying up the designs and formatting the final piece of art.

I'd also add that our final product is of the highest quality and most local print shops couldn't give you the same service.

Saying that there is an original patents page on the site for this purpose. We're happy if you're hanging patent art either way :)

What, exactly, would you print? The whole patent? A drawing or diagram? Which one(s)? Without the context of a title and subtext?

Our society encourages most people to be lazy & unimaginative, who then would rather pay a bit more money to get something readymade than go through all the steps you outlined. Same reason why all those recurring subscription cooking ingredient boxes are so popular.

This is wonderful, because if it weren't the case it'd be much harder to start a business. So congrats to the founders of that website on capturing money by firing up Photoshop and copy pasting some patent diagrams.

Do you drive all the way to the farm to get your groceries? Or do you get them at a grocery store?

Convenience adds value.

I grow them in my yard.

> have it printed there cheaper than it would cost to order from retropatents.com

Time is valuable, so is the design effort. If you could measure the value of those things, I'd say it's not really cheaper to do it your way (for many people).

Happy Friday!

I'm the co-founder of Retro Patents and we're super proud to bring the site to the HN community.

Last year, we were travelling in Europe and we came across a boutique print shop that had a Harley Davidson motorcycle patent in the window. We really liked the minimalist look to it and remembered how we'd used early product prototypes for motivation in the past. There's nothing more inspiring than seeing a world beating product stripped down to its core.

So we started the website you see today to help inspire others to go out and create magic. The prints also look really good as wall art ;)

There's a 15% discount for the HN community if you use the code (HACKER).

P.s. Max Levchin (PayPal founder) bought his own print and shared it on Twitter earlier this week - it was a great moment !

Why not the "classics" like the Edsison light bulb or the Wright flyer patent? I consider the old ones to be beautiful

We're also fans of some of the classic inventions but we have a preference for modern products that still inspire.

They're more relatable and it's cool when the actual patent authors are still alive as it makes the product's growth all the more impressive.

+1, the idea in itself is nice, maybe - ideally - you could make some sort of "public" submission form ending up in a list , and then make into production the most voted/asked for, and - say - send a free print to the person submitting the most voted one weekly or monthly.

BTW, and as a side note, not all Patent images are reproducible free of charge, so the above list might need to have an additional field for it being public domain or otherwise, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_US_patent...

Another thing, I concur with the people that see the large print of the whatever commercial name as being a spoiler of some sort, the original title might be better, as an example the "Gameboy" patent title is(was):

http://www.google.com/patents/US5184830

"Compact hand-held video game system" and the iPhone is "Electronic device": https://www.google.com/patents/USD615083S1 which sound (at least to me) a lot better.

Just as an idea, you could then have the "Gameboy" printed on the back and an extract of the patent text, like the "Field of Invention" or however the summary.

Just for your information, there is something wrong in the iPhone one, is it May 4,2010 or June 5, 2008? (i.e. publishing date vs. filing date) And the patent number is either USD615083 S1 or US D615083 S1, not just S.

These look awesome - I just ordered the Google PageRank patent! I literally want to hang every one of these in the office. My second favourite has to be the Microchip patent filed by Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor. A close third would be the IBM patent filed by Arthur Dickinson. Really great job with these overall - I'll be ordering some more for birthday presents

glad you like them and good choice :)

These are great, and something I had wanted to do for my office but didn't get around to yet. May I suggest some actual game patents in your games section along with the hardware?

I don't recall which game off the top of my head, but I've seen some that resemble the gmail/pagerank ones with a sample outlined screenshot or flowchart.

Great idea - we'll look into this, thanks!

Love the minimalist look.

Suggestion: Perhaps you could add a section for fictional patents from sci-fi universes

- Warp Drive from Star Trek

- Proton pack from Ghostbusters

- Memory erasing device from MiB

- Iron Man's arc reactor

- Batmobile

Awesome suggestion! Sounds like a fun summer project.

Two things -

1) I highly recommend Intentio, http://www.intentioipi.com, if you decide to pursue creation of patent drawings for fictional devices.

2) Be careful you don't tread on copyrights and/or trademarks.

I've seen all of these on Etsy.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/thepatentoffice

- Flux Capacitor

Looking forward to some Lodsys or Intellectual Ventures pieces, patents are great

I've seen a lot of similar "patents as art" sites - anything that sets you apart?

AFAIK we're the first to focus on the startup world. As flagged in the intro, we took our inspiration from a print of a motorcycle but wanted to flesh out the idea in the tech and gaming world which we love.

We've also filed patents ourselves so know the space pretty well.

I opened this page in a new tab along with a few other articles I meant to read. After a few seconds, the page title started flashing "Don't forget this" at me. Is this a new way to avoid tab abandonment? I'm not normally one of those people who immediately closes a page that annoys me, but holy shit that was jarring. https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4i3yhsg9jpobhj/Screenshot%202017-...

I thought it was clever. Hadn't seen it done before but I'm sure they weren't the first. I definitely agree this will get annoying very quickly if this catches on.

I also hadn't seen the "Someone from $location recently ordered #item" as a popup. Interesting twist on social validation. Saw it on this page https://www.retropatents.com/collections/all

I saw this idea way back on amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Patent-Wall-Art-Prints/dp/B0...

Unrelated to the site, but about the patents: How can a specific games console, like the Nintendo 64, be patented?

The name of the product, and maybe some brand-specific design elements, is a registered brand, sure. But a patent is for an invention, and it's not like a specific games console is a new invention - just a variant on the existing invention "games console"?

Most of these are design patents. They cover the physical form of the console -- not its function.

Found out about this a couple months ago via the Lazy Game Reviews channel, have the PS 4 Controller one on my wall I love it.

Great to hear. Thanks for the support.

Very smart idea..and nice execution. Great job.

What techie wouldn't love one (or four as a nice matrix) of these?

Thanking you kindly!

I'd buy one of the Selectric typewriter for my dad if it were available!

There's a contact us section on the site where we collect all patent requests - please feel free to submit some!

Previous post of an identical project:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990160

I learned that Elon's middle name is Reeve.

That was also a surprise to us too!

Very cool!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com