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"FacebookPinterest\n\nBack during the &amp;#39;60s, when he was president, Lyndon Johnson put his wife, Lady Bird (the only first lady to actually be named Lady), in charge of beautifying the American highway. If all she had done was keep Lyndon off the road, she would have made a significant contribution.\n\nForty years have passed, but the trash isn&amp;#39;t just on the side of the road anymore; now it&amp;#39;s bolted to the bumpers of millions of cars and trucks barreling down those same highways. Think about it: You spend big money on your dream car, and then the government makes you deface it with an ugly piece of metal. It&amp;#39;s not right.\n\nYes, the car tag is a blight on the American landscape. But it wasn&amp;#39;t always. Not that long ago, license plates were clear, no-nonsense items stamped out by those doing their hard time in the states&amp;#39; prisons. The inmates had one typeface, the state&amp;#39;s name, sometimes the state&amp;#39;s slogan, and a combination of not more than two colors to work with. That&amp;#39;s all. It was a beautiful thing in the sheer simplicity of the system, and in the strength of the design that came from those limitations.\n\nThe old tags projected confidence and just the right touch of pride. They didn&amp;#39;t try too hard. &amp;quot;Oklahoma Is OK.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Famous Potatoes.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Heart of Dixie.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Vacationland.&amp;quot; Charming.\n\nSo what happened?\n\nDoes a single car tag (no matter how great the state) really need a bad illustration, a state-shaped silhouette, a color gradation, two slogans, and a dot-com address? When plates are packed with this much ugly, it&amp;#39;s no wonder a new car depreciates by 10 percent the second you slap &amp;#39;em on and drive her off the lot.\n\nIt would be easy to blame all the bad new plates on graphic design, my chosen profession. Our research, however, doesn&amp;#39;t bear this out. In fact, it seems that very few bona fide, card-carrying graphic designers are responsible for the new plates. The rampant local-chamber-of-commerce-like boosterism displayed on the vast majority of today&amp;#39;s plates is more the work of a political committee than an individual designer.\n\nOut of fifty states, only a handful have nonoffensive plates (see below). The rest of you, however, are driving moving violations. Why put up with it? I say we take back the tag, with a real honest-to-God grassroots campaign. Call your governor. Write your congressperson. E-mail your senator. Ask\u2014no, demand\u2014that they fix this mess and end the tyranny of the butt-ugly license plate. We don&amp;#39;t all have to turn into Howard &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m mad as hell and I&amp;#39;m not going to take this anymore&amp;quot; Beale\u2014just tell them to hire a great graphic designer. That&amp;#39;s what we did. That&amp;#39;s all it would take. The designer might be a sixth-generation citizen of your great state or an immigrant, a transplant, or a native son or daughter who moved away from home. All that really matters is that they&amp;#39;re good at their craft and love your state. And this country."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/car-tag-license-plate-designer>