A new automobile tag designed by University of Alabama at Birmingham students for Alabama Audubon will be on the streets soon.
Students in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Art and Art History worked with Alabama Audubon in spring 2019 to design a new state auto tag to benefit the nonprofit organization. The state’s “distinctive” category of auto tags allows nonprofits to create a tag and then benefit from the sales of that tag.
UAB Associate Professor of graphic design Doug Barrett, MFA, and his class in BLOOM Studio worked closely with members of the local Audubon group for about eight weeks on the design. BLOOM Studio is one of the department’s community outreach programs that give students and local nonprofits the opportunity to work together on issues of interest.
The final tag design, created by UAB graduate Sydney Williams, features a red-shouldered hawk in a long-leaf pine; both are native to Alabama.
Alabama Audubon Executive Director Ansel Payne announced the tag as “a big win for birds and the Alabamians who love them!”
For this project, students did research, read over the mission statement and goals of the Alabama Audubon, and interviewed Payne before beginning work. Audubon members thought the importance of this species of hawk, indigenous to Alabama, was underrated and wanted a unique bird on the Audubon plate. The red-shouldered hawk also has very striking patterning on the wings.
Students spent about four weeks working on the plates. One of the most difficult issues with the design is meeting the state’s production requirements. The design had to use a limited color palette for reproduction and maintain visibility of numbers in the central space of the plate. That makes it challenging to create an engaging design that the public would want to purchase and place on their car, Barrett says.
A wide range of plates were designed, and several illustrated the hawk in a very graphic or even abstract way. Alabama Audubon chose a realistic illustration.
It can take up to two years to design the tag, meet the state’s production requirements, pre-sell the tags and get them into production. The state projects a three- to four-month production window before the tags will be available for purchase. Follow Alabama Audubon at @alaudubon on social media.
This is not UAB BLOOM Studio’s first foray into tag design. The Cahaba River Society’s very popular “Save the Cahaba” tag was also designed as a BLOOM Studio class project, in 2016.