Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Sign

The diamond-shaped neon sign sitting in the median here has welcomed visitors to Las Vegas since nineteen fifty-nine, and it was the work of a woman who deliberately gave it away.

Betty Willis was one of the first female commercial sign artists in Nevada. In nineteen fifty-nine, a local businessman named Ted Rogich approached her with a simple request: the city needed a flashy sign to announce itself to the stream of drivers arriving on the highway from Los Angeles. Willis designed something that perfectly captured the era's optimism: a starburst top, neon lettering, and the phrase Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. At the bottom, in smaller text, was a polite addendum for departing visitors: Drive Carefully, Come Back Soon.

When the design was complete, Willis designed it as an employee of Western Neon, which built it for about four thousand dollars, and she chose not to copyright it. She later explained her reasoning simply: if she had copyrighted the sign, it probably would not have been used as much and would not be as famous. She wanted it to belong to the city, not to her.

That decision made the image one of the most reproduced symbols in American commercial culture. The sign appears on postcards, T-shirts, movies, and advertisements in every country on earth, and because Willis never retained rights, anyone can use it without cost or permission.

The sign is built in the Googie architectural style, the mid-century American idiom of futuristic shapes, jet-age optimism, and bold geometry that flourished from Los Angeles to Las Vegas during the postwar boom. In two thousand nine, a half century after its installation, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.