Topeka ? Diane Albert’s first design brought Kansas what amounts to the Oscar for license plates.

Designing plates is part of Albert’s duties at the Department of Revenue in its Division of Vehicles. More than three years ago, she hit upon featuring a buffalo on the state’s personalized plates.

Now, with about 77,000 “Buffy” plates on the road, collectors are agog. The Automobile License Plate Collectors Assn. named the plate as the best issued in 2005 by states and Canadian provinces, and the department celebrated Tuesday during a news conference.

“This is pretty cool,” said Carmen Alldritt, the division’s director. “This is like the Academy Awards of the license plate world.”

The personalized plate is tan, with a brown border and brown letters. Its depiction of a buffalo standing in water comes from a photo. The state issues its plates in five-year cycles, and the first “Buffy” plates went to people willing to pay a $40 fee for a specialized plate starting last year.

Michael Naughton, the association’s president, said the plate is – as all good plates are – easy to read, with clean graphics. But the Kansas plate also tells people about the state.

“Does the meaning of the plate come to you right away?” he said. “Here, you see the buffalo, you think of the Great Plains, Kansas.”

Individual association members nominate plates, and most of its 3,000 active members pick the winning design, Naughton said. The association first issued its award in 1971, for a classic plate shaped like a polar bear, issued the year before by Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Kansas also won the award for 1980 and 1994.

The winning 2005 design began with a conversation Albert overheard between two young women. One commented that she would buy a license plate picturing a buffalo. Albert sketched a design, though she said her first, rough rendering wasn’t impressive.

“Being no artist, my sketch of ‘Buffy’ looked like a hairy pig,” she said.