But those plates were replaced with the new century - and New York started in on a dangerous path in its next design.  It surrendered legibility for multiple colors.  The switch to a navy and powder blue color scheme wasn't a bad decision, but the plate suffers because you can't read NEW YORK in an even larger font than what previously existed.  When I'm driving on a highway and get cut off, I want to know immediately which state that guy who just cut me off is from.  I don't want to guess and say 'Rhode Island?  New Jersey? Oklahoma?'.  I need answers on the spot.  I think the biggest error designers can make is choosing form over function.  License plates are meant to be identifiable, unique and legible.  They are not meant to depict the cornfields of Iowa, or some mountain spring bubbling out of the center of Wyoming. 

I promise not to run off on yet another tangent, but can we also agree those million varieties of plates for charities, ballclubs, universities and Lance Armstrong need to go away as well? 

When I got my first car just after graduating from college, I was living in Missouri and was pretty proud of it.  Unfortunately for me, it was also the time when the state retired its rust colored plates for a new design that left everyone in Missouri baffled.  It seemed like the rust color was too apropo for a largely rural state and they replaced it with an ugly plate featuring teal, gradients and a nod to Missouri's two favorite rivers - the Mississippi and Missouri.  So I got stuck driving around with an ugly plate designed strictly for the nineties, and another bonus: it was one of the newly printed plates that wasn't stamped into metal, but printed on some state employee's inkjet printer.  I felt gipped.

Of course, these changes were only the first ones I noticed.  Soon every state was changing their design, each racing for a less legible and gaudier plate.  Soon photographs and gradients were used together, and every ugly font this side of comic sans was written all over the designs.  Web addresses started being printed, which may have helped usher in the era of the smartphone.  "Gee Honey, the state of South Carolina has a website!  Can you look that up on your iphone please?"

But as witnessed in the other states, Texas went crazy and messed with perfection.  They added a hokey cowboy scene at the bottom of the plate, put a red font on a blue gradient sky, and lodged the moon in one corner and the space shuttle in the other. 

Not content to make an ugly plate, Texas made two other small changes after its initial release - by taking the simple red outline of Texas in the middle of the plate and overlaying the Texas flag, and also by having some state bureaucrat decide its not patriotic enough so they slapped an American flag on the side of the Space Shuttle.  While they were at it, they could've written 'GOD' on the face of the moon and pleased everyone in the state, except of course, for those ornery bunch of secessionists.
 

There are plenty of things wrong with this plate, so here they are:

• It uses a photograph instead of legible graphic elements.  As bad as the cowboy silhouette of the previous plate was, it acted as a graphic frieze that framed the plate.  The photograph is also gradiated out to create a space for the numbers in the middle, but text and photographs never look good together.
• The ubiquitous Texas flag/Lone Star motif.  Once in the middle with the flag/state logo, which already can be seen on every tailgate on every truck in Texas already.
• The blue and red 'scribble art mark' that makes another reference to the flag in the upper left.  There is nothing, nothing!  worse in the design and art world than that scribbly line.  Non-artists think it looks artsy, artists thinks it looks horrible, and artists who use it aren't really artists.  Go back to Santa Fe before you ruin everything for the rest of us.
• Mismatching fonts:  Why use one font when you can use three different ones, one extremely ugly 'TEXAS' font and a script font that should only be used on retro looking copy.  

Finally!!!  The ray of sunshine that set off this entire tangent, which has now stretched into a third hour of writing.  (Looks like I'll edit this later)

New York's new plates are throwbacks to their old classics, with a nominal modern twist with the arched blue facade at the top.  A perfectly legible, nice, and distinctive plate that isn't overly designed and followed that old motto:

Keep It Simple Stupid