Skip Navigation Website Accessibility
220 S. Wabash Ave. Chicago, IL 60604
(312) 431-9588

Obama Commemorative License Plates


Here, in Chicago, we take an extra measure of pride in our local guy-turned-President, Barack Obama. He began his run here and was, at one time, one of our two Illinois State Senators. Chicago is his home and Illinois the fount of his political career. This was not lost on the Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White who, with his staff, came up with these commemorative license plates for Illinois residents. A client of ours brought in a set of them and asked us to frame them for her, giving us "license" to design a composition that would look great. What you see below is the end result.

The frame is a Designer Moulding D86-12 in frosted silver metal. The top mat is Crescent C7113 blue suede and the bottom is Crescent 9837 All- American Red (naturally!). We cut the openings for the license plates with radiused corners to mimic the shape of the plates.

We added another element to her framing that she loved: We carved Obama's campaign slogan into the mats with our Wizard 8500 computerized mat cutter: YES WE CAN. That is exactly what we said when we suggested to her that we might do this in the matting and she asked if we really could.

The glass is Tru-Vue Conservation Clear to retard the fading of colors from U/V exposure. Overall size of the glass came to 17 1/2 x 20 5/8. The images photographed a bit on the blue side, since my camera flash was not adjusted properly. The glass is actually almost tint-free and the colors much more vibrant than the way they photographed.

Designed and executed by Brian Flax, CPF

Images shown by kind permission of G. Johnson.

The blue suede mat has radiused corners in each of the two mat openings for the plates. The plates sit on top of a red bottom mat.
When we cut the letters in the top mat, the red mat on the bottom shows through. We can cut any message you want in your mats.