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I recently noticed that the State of Illinois has changed the font of the *stamping* on license plates.
The design is the same, but the stamped text is a bit thinner and the glyphs are blockier.
I am surprised how much this change is bothering me, to be honest. It has never occurred to me how much that is a defining feature. The first one I saw I assumed had to be fake!
@TechConnectify Interesting that the USA is still stamping licence plates. The UK stopped doing this back in the 1970s. There was a brief period of vinyl over metal. Nowadays it's black vinyl under methacrylate with a highly reflective backing. There has recently been a spate of barely legal "3D" plates with plastic letters stuck to the front of a reflective plate. (Now outlawed for new cars.)
And you don't need to get a plate made by the government. Most auto supplies shops can do it.
@nowster plenty of states don't these days, but to be honest I don't see a reason not to other than to make the process a little cheaper. It certainly makes fake plates easy to spot.
On the point of dealerships, some of them are given a supply of pre-made plates from the state. Others, though, register your car with a temporary plate and then you get a real one in the mail in a month or so.
@mark @nowster mmm that's not really what I mean by temporary.
Dealerships do have a special dealer plate (which changes color every year) they can slap on any car to move them around or for test drives or whatever.
But at least in Illinois, the plate only serves to reference who the car belongs to. It doesn't stick with the car, it's the driver's property. So a temp plate is just a laminated piece of paper to serve that purpose between when the car is bought and the state issues a real plate.
@mark @nowster and every time the car is sold, the owner is obliged to take the plates off. If they're getting a new car, they can be transferred to the new one for a fee. Or they can just keep them as a souvenir. Or recycle them at registration offices or stick 'em in any mailbox.
If you wake up and find your plates were stolen you report them as stolen and are issued new ones. The state handles all of it and it's honestly surprising to me that that's delegated in other countries.
@TechConnectify @mark @nowster here in Romania it's even more ridiculous - thet technically belong to the car, but you're required to take the plates off and return them to the registration authority when you sell the car.
The new owner can then explicitly request to use the same number, and I think end up picking up the same plates that were dropped off by the person they got the car from but with an extra trip and paperwork involved 
@hazelnot sometimes it's nice to know that our government actually has a few things it's doing *better* than other places!