License Plate Sanity Restored

Stupid Design

About 3 years ago, Texas changed their license plate design to something that made them unreadable from more than 10 feet away.  I am sure they looked beautiful in a high-resolution, brightly lit setting to a committee of clueless overseers, but they failed to deliver on what should have been the number one requirement: readable at a distance in a variety of lighting conditions.

How does a group of people get put in charge of redesigning license plates and fail to deliver on the readability requirement?  How is is that at every step of the design and approval process no one ever raised this question? Did they ever even think to consult the number one user of the plates: law enforcement?  Would any police officer fail to spot this fatal design issue immediately?  This was an epic failure of government, committees and common sense.

It may not sound like it, but this is meant to be a positive, uplifting story. We come to that end by noting that Texas has corrected the problem and is (yet again) going to put out a new design, precisely to address the current problem of readability. And it took the Texas government only 3 years to recognize and fix the problem: maybe a new record.

This new design harken back to much older designs, and I like them a lot.  Simple, effective and functional.  Now I have to figure out how to trade in my plate for a new style one.

Sensible Design