NEBRASKA -- Tuesday morning Gov. Pete Ricketts announced the new Nebraska license plate design that will be released in 2023. 

Ricketts said that by state statute, Nebraska has to update its license plate every six years. 

Susanne Shore, Ricketts' wife, said that she started thinking about the new design when Ricketts was reelected in 2018 because she didn't want this to be something that snuck up on them. 

"There are legislatively required mandates that go along, that affect this general plate that don't affect the specialty plates out there," Shore said. "Those specialty plates have no real requirements."

Shore said that specialty plates don't even have to be legible. 

"The general plate's very different than that," Shore said. "We are required to have certain size of letters and numbers and the dash. That doesn't allow us to do things like shift the position of those, like the Department of Parks and Rec do - where you have the side animal with the box turtle or the sandhill crane - we couldn't do that."

Shore also said that they are also obligated to use certain colors, certain font size for "Nebraska" and it's supposed to be in a certain position as well. 

Drew Davies chose a mosaic from the State Capitol as the inspiration for the plate "The Genius of Creative Energy."

The license plate will be released in January 2023. 

Davies is a Nebraska Brand Consultant. Davies was asked "Why blue?"

"The short answer is we had a limited color pallet based on the specifications of what the plate could and couldn't be printed in," Davies said. 

He said they honed in on keeping the color simple and straightforward to feature the artwork. 

You are able to watch the press conference below: