A planar serial manipulator is well suited for industrial applications in aided automation manufacturing, engineering applications for space robots, excavators, and pump trucks as well as medical applications for orthopaedic surgery robotics and micro-holder for tactile sending fingers. This study presents a detailed discussion on the classification, joint angle ranges and solution space atlases for analysis and design of the planar serial manipulators. The planar manipulators are categorized into three classes with further several sub-classes based on link lengths in terms of joint angle ranges. Furthermore, an improved bounded solution space is proposed to display global performances of the manipulators that leads to a design with global optimization. Besides, the joint angle ranges of the manipulator are displayed over the characteristics charts in no relation to the assembly orders of the manipulator links. Finally, case studies illustrate the presented idea. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.