Utah's black-and-white historical license plates have been a huge hit, and now other designs are lining up to be your car's newest accessory. Starting July 1, special group license plates will get a major makeover. That includes the Great Salt Lake license plate, which launched in 2025.
"People have endearingly called this plate a 'bake sale' for the Great Salt Lake," state Sen. Jen Plumb, the bill sponsor behind the plate, said in a statement. "And if there's one thing we know in Utah, it's that bake sales work!"
Group plates charge an annual fee to support a cause. The wildly popular black plate, for example, has raised millions for the Utah Historical Society. With the makeover, many have swapped their old look — a rectangle on the left side of an otherwise blank slate — for a bold full-color design.
The new Great Salt Lake license plate shows the sun setting over the mountains that surround the water while a pelican flies on one side.
A lot happened behind the scenes to get to full-plate designs. A 2024 law established a review board to look over proposed designs. Before that, it was a bit of a free-for-all, said Jason Gardner, deputy executive director of the Utah State Tax Commission. Some groups submitted really nice images, he said, but there was no streamlined approval process.
"Some people would just, like, use clip art," he said.
The state contracted with a graphic designer to reimagine the current special plates. Like with the Great Salt Lake, many organizers opted for a full-plate design, including schools like the University of Utah and Brigham Young University and sports teams like the Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth. All will be framed by "Utah" at the top in the same font, a tagline at the bottom and a beehive logo in the bottom-right corner.
"One thing the board felt very strongly about is having kind of a consistent — if not a consistent design, more of a consistent theme," Gardner said.
Utah's license plates are made at the state prison, which used to rely on decades-old equipment, Gardner said. A recent upgrade made these new designs possible, while switching from embossed letters to flat-printed ones.
"It just opened up our ability to do full-plate designs with, like, vivid colors and really, really crisp images," Gardner said.
The America 250 plate, which launched this spring, offered a sneak peek of the new design. As a standard-issue plate, it skipped to the front of the design queue. A white plate with black letters, a mirror of the black plate, is also coming down the pike.
To switch from an old design to a new design of the same plate, you'll have to pay a $23.75 fee. To switch to a totally new option, you'll also need to make the annual contribution, which is at least $25.
To avoid flooding local Motor Vehicle Division offices, Gardner begs license plate enthusiasts to make the change online. New plates will be mailed out and aren't available in person.
Utahns holding out for a dark sky plate will have to wait longer. Alan Eastman, former chair of Dark Sky Utah, has been working to get it up and onto the backs of cars. It was created under state law in 2022, and proceeds will support dark sky initiatives at Utah state parks.
Dark Sky Utah and the state's designer are finalizing the details, but Eastman is stoked with how it's coming along. A draft version shows people looking up at the Big Dipper under the Owachomo Bridge at Natural Bridges National Monument — the world's first International Dark Sky Park.
The license plate doesn't show the Big Dipper exactly where it is in relation to the monument, Eastman said, but that's not the point.
"The point is we want people out enjoying the skies, and they can learn about the geography when they get to wherever they're looking."
The state has an ongoing contract with the graphic designer, so as long as they keep working together, plates that are created down the line will likely have a similar feel.
Gardner thinks people choose special plates because they like the style, just like how they might choose to put on bumper stickers. That's why he has a black plate on his white truck. But the state's design overhaul also aims to make it obvious that these identifiers belong to Utah.
"We do need to make it clear for law enforcement in the end," he said.
Macy Lipkin is a Report for America corps member who reports for KUER in northern Utah.
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