I want to protect the intellectual property of a design for a certificate (diploma) that is non-trivial and distinctive. Most of the distinctiveness of the design comes from the position of the different elements such as the title, a certificate id and a seal. All of these elements are variable. For example, the title can be any word, the id can be any number, etc.
I thought the Design Patent was the way forward, but after creating the drawing, I realized that most of the elements are dashed, as I am not claiming that particular element but the position in the document.
Do you know if a document layout can be protected by a design patent (community design, etc), or do you have examples of design patents granted on document layouts?