PCB design is no doubt significant part for creating a PCB board, and also the most difficult process according to some posts in the PCB design forums. Even so, there are some electronics hobbyists and engineers loving doing the PCB designing work by themselves instead of finding a online PCB design service. So if you are one of them, you are gonna have to pay much more attention to these "pitfalls". 1. Unclear specification of processing layer The design of single-sided board should be processed in the top layer. But it could be processed in the front and back sides if without any specification, the board made is likely not to be good for components soldering. 2. A large area of copper foil is too close to the outline The copper foil should be at least 0.2mm away from the outline, being too close will likely cause copper foil affected by milling and result in lifted copper foil and detached solder mask. 3. Draw the pad with filler Drawing the pad with filler when designing routing may be ok in the DRC test, but it is not ok for tooling. Because the pad can not directly generate the solder mask data, the area of filler will be covered by the solder mask, which will make it quite difficult to solder components. 4. Character is not in the place Character covering the pad will bring inconvenience to the on-off testing and component soldering of PCB. Also, if character is too small or too big, it will cause difficulties to the PCB manufacturing process like silkscreen. 5. SMD pad is too short This is For the high-density SMD, the pins are close to each other, and the pad is quite thin. In the on-off test, installing testing pin need some space to move flexibly, if the pad is too short, it will make the test quite inconvenient. 6. Single-sided pad aperture setting Single-sided pads are generally not drilled holes, but if drilling, it must be marked particularly, and the aperture should be designed as zero. If a numerical value was set to the aperture, the location would show a coordinate when drilling data was generated, this is not gonna work. 7. pad overlap If multiple drilling happened to a same location, it would cause damaged hole. 8. Too many fillers in the design or filling with overly thin line There is a loss of light printing data, light printing data is not complete. In the light printing data processing, filler is drawn by lines, so the light printing data generated is quite huge, which increase the difficulty of data processing. 9. The abuse of graphics We often see some useless or casual lines in the graphics causing the misunderstood design on PCB, so it’s the best just keeping the graphics intact and clear.