Chris mentioned to me that there were new license plate designs floating about, and much to my shame I hadn’t noticed the trend. I like to call myself a font geek so my excuse for not noticing the change is that there are a number of fake plates you can get that are floating about; plates that are in the UK registration plate font etc, and you see these with enough regularity it’s something I had just sort of ignored.
However, it seems there has definitely been a change—as you can see in the crappy photo (taken at night, I’ll try and remember to take a better one). The new font is bolder, slightly smaller and now has serifs. Someone guessed the change was made because of new license plate recognition technology and I think this is a pretty good guess.
I’ve been trying to figure out when the change happened. So far I’ve seen every plate with DGX-XXX in the new style, and I’ve seen some DFX-XXX plates with both, so that’s my best guess. I found this page on Land Transport New Zealand’s site about the history of registration plates but strangely they had no new information about the change, so I’ve emailed them to see if I could find out more information.
I know, I’m a nerd.
UPDATE: Got a response back from Land Transport NZ on the license plate change:
Good morning Lee
Thank you for your email dated 24 May 2006.
The NZ character font set of dies used in the manufacture of NZ vehicle plates was in need of replacement due to wear and tear. This provided the opportunity to introduce a standard character set that is tamper proof and had better readability for enforcement purposes.
Land Transport NZ went through considerable research and testing in conjunction with the Police and Industrial Research Limited to establish a NZ/Euro character font set that would be best for NZ conditions.
The testing regime included:
1. Comparing the visual and photographic legibility of registration plate samples bearing the NZ character sets and the new NZ/EURO character sets
2. Assessing the conformance of opaque plate areas of sample plates of the NZ/EURO character set with Land Transport NZ specifications
3. Assessing the reflectivity properties of sample plates of the NZ/EURO character set with current Land Transport NZ specifications
The new NZ/EURO plate font has slightly thicker and more distinguishable characters than the previous font.
All plates, General Purpose, Personalised and Trade plates manufactured from 1 March 2006 will have the new plate character font with the plate series starting DFN .
I hope this is of assistance.
Kind regards
Email Response Team
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