Background
I’ve spent time exploring the Colorado license plate as a design system — studying how its structure, hierarchy, and constraints can carry new meaning while staying faithful to the original format. That work has been largely intellectual. An exercise in fidelity, compression, and identity.
This project was different. This one was personal.
My daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2016. She was treated that summer and has been “clear” ever since. Nearly a decade later, that experience still shapes how I move through the world — and occasionally, how I work.
When I saw that the Morgan Adams Foundation was inviting families to share photos of their Colorado Cure Childhood Cancer license plates, something clicked. I didn’t wait for a brief. I just started designing.
Project Scope
- Deliverables: Adobe Illustrator File, PNG file (CMYK)
- Tools: Adobe Illustrator
- Role: Designer— unsolicited, donated
Objective
Create a sticker that could be given away at the Colorado Auto Show representing the Morgan Adams Foundation — a Colorado organization funding childhood cancer research.
The design needed to feel authentic to Colorado, work at a small format, and carry meaning without explanation. It also needed to look like it belonged at a car show.
The Colorado license plate solved all of that at once.
Problem Statement
The core constraints were familiar: a small surface, an established visual system, and the requirement that the result feel completely authentic rather than decorative.
The Colorado Childhood Cancer Awareness plate already exists as a real program. Drivers can purchase specialty plates to show support. That format carries instant recognition — especially at a car show. The sticker needed to honor that recognition while layering in the foundation’s specific identity.
The challenge was fitting two identities — Colorado and Morgan Adams — into 3 × 1.5 inches without breaking either one.
Design Decisions
The Plate Structure The foundation of the design is strict fidelity to the Colorado license plate system. Proportions, hierarchy, spacing, and visual balance are treated as fixed constraints. Nothing is redesigned or abstracted. The plate is preserved as a functional system — the same approach I’ve used in earlier plate work.
Colorado defines the structure. The foundation defines the message.
Personalization: MGNADMS Real specialty plates are personalized. Ours had to be too. MGNADMS — Morgan Adams compressed into vanity plate format — fills the plate in the condensed bold letterforms that make license plates readable at speed. It’s immediately decodable to anyone who knows the foundation, and intriguing to anyone who doesn’t.
Tagline: CURE CHILDHOOD CANCER Colorado specialty plates carry a cause line beneath the personalization. Four words. No elaboration needed. It’s the mission, stated plainly.
The Registration Sticker Details This is where the design gets specific. Real Colorado plates carry two registration stickers in the lower corners. Rather than leave them blank or generic, both were replaced with meaningful stand-ins:
- Bottom left: The Morgan Adams Foundation logo, set in the foundation’s signature maroon, designed to read as an official registration decal
- Bottom right: “26” — representing 2026, the year of the auto show, styled as a year sticker
To a casual glance, they read as registration stickers. To someone who knows the foundation, they’re a signature. That dual read was intentional.
Typography and Color
Both follow the same rules established in earlier plate work. Condensed bold letterforms match the density and behavior of real license plate text. Color is inherited directly from the Colorado plate system — no new palette introduced, no decorative effects added. Contrast is prioritized for legibility at production scale.
The only color introduced outside the plate system is the foundation’s maroon in the logo sticker. It earns its place by functioning as a registration decal, not as decoration.
Outcome
The finished sticker is 3 × 1.5 inches — large enough to read clearly, small enough to live on a laptop or water bottle. It reads as a believable variation of a real Colorado specialty plate while carrying the Morgan Adams Foundation’s identity through every detail.
I didn’t pitch this. I didn’t invoice it. I made it and gave it to them — timed to coincide with the auto show where it would be handed out to attendees.
If someone sticks one on their laptop and a stranger asks what MGNADMS means, the Morgan Adams Foundation gets introduced to someone new. That’s the sticker doing its job long after the show ends.
Sometimes you have a skill, a cause, and an opportunity. The only thing that makes sense is to put them together.
The Morgan Adams Foundation funds childhood cancer research. Learn more at morganadamsfoundation.org.