South Dakota License Plate Slogan

South Dakota began its statewide license plate reissue in January 2023. The current passenger design uses a full-color Mount Rushmore background, black serials, county-coded formats, and the continuing "Great Faces. Great Places." slogan.

The 2023 base replaced the beige 2016-2022 Mount Rushmore plate. The serial sequences continued by county rather than starting the whole system over, so the visual design changed while the underlying county-coded registration structure remained familiar.

The important accuracy point is that the slogan did not end with any of the older Rushmore bases. It is still the current passenger plate slogan as of 2026.

"Great Faces. Great Places." works as a compact double reference. The "great faces" are the four presidents carved into Mount Rushmore, and the "great places" are the broader South Dakota landscapes: the Black Hills, Badlands, prairie, and tourist routes that surround the monument.

The punctuation gives the slogan its punch. It reads as two short sentences rather than one long tourism phrase, which makes it easy to read on a plate and easy to remember.

The current 2023 plate keeps the slogan with a full-color Mount Rushmore graphic and blue-sky background. That continuity matters: South Dakota updated the base design, but not the core identity phrase.

South Dakota's earliest documented passenger plate slogan was "RUSHMORE MEMORIAL" in 1939. Mount Rushmore was still under construction at the time; carving began in 1927 and was completed in 1941.

That makes the 1939 plate a small but telling piece of tourism history. South Dakota was already using its license plate to point drivers toward a landmark that had not yet become the finished national icon.

Later plates broadened the Rushmore idea. "RUSHMORE MEMORIAL" named the monument directly; "Great Faces. Great Places." turns the same landmark into a wider statewide tourism identity.

South Dakota's slogan sequence runs from a direct Mount Rushmore memorial label, through the statehood centennial, into the long-running Great Faces era.

The 1987-1990 centennial plate is easy to describe too strongly. "Celebrate the Century" was not necessarily printed as a universal slogan on every plate; references describe it as optional.

The base commemorated South Dakota's statehood centennial, but the optional phrase meant two versions circulated: one with the celebratory slogan and one without it.

That nuance is worth keeping because it separates South Dakota from many states that printed anniversary wording directly on every general-issue plate.