License Plate Design–A Sampler

Ken Carbone has written another excellent blog post for Fast Company, this time on a topic that’s inescapable for anyone driving on American roads: license plates.
Carbone breaks license plate designs into three groups:

In an attempt to encourage plates that could fall into a fourth group, “good design,” Carbone asked a few creatives to revamp plates for California, Illinois, and Texas.
Here are the existing plates:

To see the envelope-pushing redesigns, read “Rebranding the License Plate: 4 Designers Clean Up Graphic Road Kill.”
If you now have the itch to redesign a license plate yourself, make scratching the itch a little easier with Mordy Golding’s embossing how-to.