did you see the website on that license plate?

DID YOU SEE THE WEBSITE ON THAT

LICENSE PLATE?THERE ARE WEBSITES ON LICENSE PLATES.

HAVE YOU EVER VISITED ANY?

BY JEFF MACHARYAS

WWW.MACHARYAS.COM

“ I whistled for a cab and when

it came near.

The license plate said FRESH

and it had dice in the mirror.

If anything I can say this cab is rare.

But I thought now forget it—yo homes to Bel Air.”

—the Fresh Prince oF Bel Air

It’s likely that Will Smith didn’t see a website on that FRESH license plate

way back in 1990 when The Fresh Prince of Bel Air premiered. Now, he

would see one on that California license plate: dmv.ca.gov. Huh?

Have you ever been stuck in traffic and stared at the car in front of you? Have you noticed that there is a website on the license plate? No? Well, now is your chance to see a review of 19 (and growing) official license plates with

websites emblazoned right on them! You don’t even have to get in your car! Some states (Arkansas) look great and get the message across elegantly. But, then, there’s Florida. And Maryland. And Georgia.

License plates are used by states (and areas outside the US) to promote their l ocales and give themselves a unique identity. Many license plate designs carry over to other uses and some would be know even if they did not have the state name on them. Having watched old cop shows from the 60s and 70s, one gets very familiar with the orange-and-blue California and New York plates on cars driven by Rockford, Barretta, Mannix, and Barnaby Jones.

Some are known by their slogan. “Famous Potatoes” can only be … Idaho, but some are more mysterious, such as “The Peace Garden State.” Umm. Let’s see…. oh, it’s North Dakota. Of course.

Pass the Plate

Since the dawn of the internet age, we’ve seen websites emblazoned on everything. It didn’t take long for states to get into the act by placing websites on their state

Pull Over! There’s a Website on that License Plate!

plates. Some started out quite awkwardly, like Pennyslvania’s www.state.pa.us, which has been shortened to visitPA.com.

Have you ever felt compelled to visit a state’s website just because you’ve seen it on the car in front of you?I grew up in Florida and returned to the state eight years ago. Since then

I’ve had a license plate on my car that reads myFlorida.com. Even though I love license plates, design and websites, it was not until recently that I visited myFlorida.com. It is also the first time I’ve ever visited any of the websites I’ve seen on license plates. My guess is that very few people do.

I gassed up the Googler and went in search of all the license plates I could find that have (or had) websites on them. I found an article by Ethan Wolff-Mann (yes, really) that got me started on this quest. His page, Ranked License Plates, ranked all the license plates by design. I agreed with most of his choices, but would have ranked New York much higher.

A review of license plates with websites on them and the websites themselves.

Jeff Macharyas • www.macharyas.com

Pull Over! There’s a Website on that License Plate!

PAI like that the website colors have some similarity

to the license plate and it has great photos. It

also appeals to a visitor by offering a Vacation

Guide. The top part is a bit of a jumble. Their

license plate is recognizable and easy to read,

but nothing too exciting.

SCSouth carolina has always done a good

branding job. They have a great flag,

have always had great license plates and their

website is very nice, too. I like how the treeline

on the license plates mimics the torn paper

look of the website and they have wonderful

photos and makes it very attractive to visitors.

TNSimilar to South Carolina’s website,

this site has excellent images, fantastic

typography and an easy, appealing layout.

I hate their license plate, though. The website

looks tacked on, there are too many typefaces

and too many small details. From a distance,

you’d have no idea what was going on here.

NENebraska has a nice license plate, but I think

some of their previous ones were much

better, especially the simple red & white state

outline they had in the 70s. The URL on the

plate: nebraska.gov, is pretty serious. It doesn’t

say “visit Nebraska” and it takes you to a

website that does nothing to attract people to

the birthplace of Leslie Lynch King, Jr. (better

known as President Gerald R. Ford).

MII love michigan. Their license plate is awful,

though. I don’t get the swishy M. The web-

site is pretty nice (what’s with all the kayaks on

these sites?). It’s not that exciting to look at but

it serves its purpose and is easy to get around in.

I’m not a fan of “Pure Michigan.” Sounds like it

could be referring to eugenics or hand sanitizer

or something.

MDAnother .gov site. Here again, the .gov takes you to a very .gov place. It has nice images but is

overshadowed by the giant search bar and rotating facts—that visitors to the state would just not find interesting: 371 tax payments made last month. Wow! Come on kids! Marylanders are pay-ing their taxes! Let’s go see! Let’s not. Although their license plate is easily recognizable by their LSD-induced flag, it really looks bad when they get dinged up and dirty. They always look dirty to me.

MNCool job, minnesota. Everyone knows the 10,000

Lakes thing and their license plate is like a

Where’s Waldo puzzle. Can you find the canoe?

However, their URL is more obscured than the

canoeists. It took a few looks to even realize there

was a .com on there. But, I was pleased to find

their website had great photos, a nice logo, nice

type, easy navigation for tourists, and an interest-

ing and appropriate URL: ExploreMinnesota.com.

I want to go there!

GAI think georgia has gotten rid of the .gov from their plates and good riddance. I never liked the

Georgia license plates because there was always so much going on. I always felt it was really close to being South Carolina-good but just couldn’t pull it off. Several years ago, they changed their flag and then had to quickly change it again be-cause it was just too awful to display. I think the same should go for their website. Like Maryland, we are presented with a giant search bar. There’s also some guy with his eyes closed. Maybe he just doesn’t want to look at the website. Who can blame him? Who is he? And, their “logo” at the top is pathetic. The devil went down to Georgia, he had a website to design…..

CACalifornia dreamin’ (of getting rid of this stuff). They need to go back to the iconic Streets of

San Francisco blue-and-gold license plates. Plain, simple, but very identifiable. The URL on the Cal plates is bizarro. Would anyone driving behind a car with this plate write this down and check it out to see what cool stuff the…DMV…has to offer? But, if sticking pins in your eyes gets old, check it out. Visitors to the state of California can learn all about AB60 Driver License Imple-mentation. Off we go! I think Maryland, Georgia and California should merge into just one awful website and be done with it.

PEIPrince edward island is not a state, by the way. It was the only Canadian province I could find

that had a URL on their plate. Made famous by Anne of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island is now Canada’s Green Province. OK, sounds good. I like the colors of the plate and I guess the wind turbine is one reason they are “green.” It has a little Canadian flag on it, and who doesn’t like the Canadian flag? The URL, www.peiplay.com, is awkward. It looks like a typo. It goes to an OK website with a lot of info. Nothing spectacular, but it works just fine.

FLHoly palm trees, batman! Are you kidding me? I live in Florida but have never before gone to this absolute

crap website. What an embarrassment. The URL is plas-tered on the plates in big, arched letters and tells you it is your Florida. Based on this website, you can have it back. I could not believe what I saw. It claims to be the “Official Portal of The State of Florida.” (With a capitilaized “The.”) I think the web designer was preoccupied with 19… 19… 1985. I’ve seen old AOL Homesite pages that looked bet-ter than this. This is what the state wants tourists to see? I can’t believe anyone would want to come here. If you go to this site, you’d think it was some authoritarian police state with no sense of humor or style. Oh, wait…. On the right, there is a micro photo of our governor, Rick “Valde-mort” Scott. The photo is stretched a bit horizontally so Rick kinda looks like Mr. Clean instead.There’s a tab on the left for visitors to click. Don’t do it! Save yourself! Oh my, oh my, oh myFlorida! Florida: You’re no Maryland, that’s for sure.

OHI was waiting at a light in Stuart, Florida and saw an Ohio license plate in front of me. Hey! They

have a website, too! How could I have missed it? Welllll… it’s kinda ghosted and hidden and part of a bunch of other indecipherable words and has a weird “17” next to it. I guess that’s a date maybe.Their website is OK, what you’d expect and cer-tainly better than Florida. One nice feature, although it’s not on that website, is they have a lot of info on the plate itself.

INJust found that indiana had a website on their license plates, too. It seems that they have since aban-

doned the idea, though. Indiana has had some nice plates and the barcode at the bottom is kinda inter-esting. It reminds me of the license plate on the back of the DeLorean in Back to the Future. The website the license plate refers to is nice-looking, but like Maryland, it is dominated by a giant search bar and also has weird stats that they announce: 1,491 crim-inal records viewed today. Uh-oh, looks like crime is a popular sport in the Hoosier State. I think the site would have been much better if it featured the folks from Parks & Recreation instead. Nick Offerman’s (Ron Swanson) scowl on the site would be more interesting than crime figures.

ALAlabama joins the collection with this conser-

vation specialty plate that costs $50 per

year. I like the unique colors of the plate and

the URL is easy to read. I went to the website

and, as it loaded, I thought: wow! this is gonna

be cool! But once loaded, it was almost impos-

sible to read. A really good start, but the first

rule of typography is that is must be readable.

KYHere’s another specialty plate that features a website. In 2013, Kentucky approved the

“World-Record Smallmouth Bass” license plate. The mega-bass was caught in 1955, so it only took 58 years to honor the li’l fella, but a fish gets its day.The Kentucky Fish & Wildlife Foun-dation sponsored this plate and it must certainly appeal to anglers. It’s a nice-looking plate, and in this case, there is an actual image of the plate when you visit the website that’s on the plate! Hello, Maryland, are you listening? I give this one an A for that. The website isn’t much to look at, but certainly better than that cringe-worthy effort from The Sunshine State. Anglers from Kentucky to other fishing-popular states, like Florida would like what you’ve done. Good job, Bluegrass State!

VAWow, i didn’t realize my former home state (Orange County) had a new license plate until I saw one on the road while driving on I-81 in Virginia. Jamestown has been

replaced with “Virginia is for Lovers” and a website (virginia.org) to go with it! The license plates retain the simple blue-and-white motif they’ve had since the Earth was young and full of promise, but it it does give it an iconic look. The website, virginia.org, is very nice. It has great photos, easy navigation and is what you’d expect. I also hap-pened upon another Virginia license plate with website. This one was proposed in 2011 and I guess didn’t make it. Virginia Tech was one of the supporting members of the “Virginia Loves Trees” license plate. Virginia didn’t love trees enough, which is too bad, it’s a nice looking plate. The website, valovestrees.org, is not a valid domain.

LAIn honor of andrew jackson’s Battle of New Orleans vic-tory in 1815, Louisiana issued a special license plate

commemorating the event. Andrew Jackson, as you re-call, is the wild-haired dude on the $20 bill that a lot of people would like to be removed due to his treatment of Native Americans back in the early 1800s. The plate features a guy on a horse, who, I guess, is Mr. Jackson. It’s not that exciting. The website it advertises, Louisi-anaTravel.com, is nice, but when I first viewed it on my laptop, I couldn’t really see much of it. Also, once again, nothing to tie in the license plate with the website. Un-fortunately, due to Americans’ appalling lack of knowl-edge in our own history, I’m sure many would see this plate and have no idea what it is promoting. (I saw one on the road in Stuart, Florida the day after I added this.)

SXMLike prince edward island, Saint Maarten is not a state. It is a Dutch territory in the Caribbean that shares an island

with St. Martin, a French territory. That could get confus-ing. The Dutch side touts their part of the island as “The Friendly Island.” The French side, it seems, uses a Euro-pean French license plate. I guess they’re not as friendly as the Dutch. They have a variety of designs, and the one shown here features a pelican. There’s a Pelican Key, so I guess pelicans are popular in St. Maarten, just as they are in Louisiana, but I’ll be brief. Interestingly, the license plate doesn’t actually “say” St. Maarten, it just appears in the URL. The location could be perceived as “The Friend-ly Island.” The website advertised, Error! Hyperlink ref-erence not valid., is pretty nice and has some interesting color choices that seem to make sense for a tropical re-sort island. No connection to the license plate, of course, but visitors to the site will find what they want. I’ve never actually seen a St. Maarten license plate on the road, but I have seen Hawaii and Guam, so maybe some day I will.

ARArkansas! wow! you rock, Natural State. I just came across this specialty plate for

Arkansas State Parks and was lovin’ it. This is a really nice-looking plate, nice typography, great colors and makes me want to drive out there now and commune with nature (just so long as former Governor Mike Huckabee is not around!). The website emblazoned on the plate, www.ArkansasStateParks.com, is just as nice as the plate. I included extra screenshots of it to show that they actually tie in the li-cense plate with the website! What a concept! My compliments to whomever was involved in the design and execution of the plates and website. Very, very nice.

Is it a Good Idea to Put Websites on License Plates?

NOSTATE WEBSITE

I don’t think adding websites to license plates is a good idea.

I certainly don’t like it when the state name becomes part of

the URL (myFlorida.com, for example). I was surprised there

weren’t more states doing this. One thing that really surprised me,

though, is that even the good states like South Carolina and Ten-

nessee, didn’t tie in their license plate with their website. There

wasn’t any connection between the two to indicate that you got

there because you saw it on the license plate. I wonder if these

states do any kind of analytics on this. Hey! 647 Child Support

Applications filed in Maryland—Maryland.gov tells me so.

Ratings of Design of License Plates and Websites

License Plate HHHHHWebsite HHHHH






License Plate HHHHHHWebsite HHHHHH

Best in Show:Arkansas

JEFF MACHARYASWWW.MACHARYAS.COM

DID YOU SEE THE WEBSITE ON THAT

LICENSE PLATE?THERE ARE WEBSITES ON LICENSE PLATES.

HAVE YOU EVER VISITED ANY?

BY JEFF MACHARYAS

WWW.MACHARYAS.COM