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The day that Stuart Simple decided to become an artist, he was 8 years old.
His mom took him to a museum in London, and from across the floor of the gallery, he saw this beacon of yellow.
The painting was sunflowers by Van Gogh.
Those colors are what inspired Stuart to become an artist.
These days he makes giant installation pieces with bright yellow smiley faces made of steel, or he does these pop art collages with lots of neon colors.
Stuart often designs his art on the computer, which is why it was a big deal two years ago when all of his colors disappeared.
One day I switched my laptop on, and all the colors in the files are black.
All the colors are gone.
And who had taken the colors?
The modern world could not function without standards.
A bunch of people or companies deciding, okay, this is what a USB-C plug looks like.
Or this is the shape of a lightbulb socket.
Or this bunch of dots and dashes will be the sign and morse code for SOS.
But the thing about standards is they only work if everyone is on the same standard, which kind of becomes this chicken or egg question, right?
How do you make a standard into a standard?
The story of how Pantone became a standard starts with one man about 60 years ago.
Nice man, but a tough man.
This is Richard Herbert.
He's talking about his dad Larry, the inventor of the Pantone standard.
He used to always use the saying, takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.
So he takes a tough man to make an accurate color.
Now we did reach out to Larry for this episode, but he wasn't available.
Richard, though, worked at Pantone for decades.
He eventually became the president of the company.
And Richard tells us that back in the 1960s, his dad Larry worked at a printing company, making brochures and signs and posters.
And he noticed this issue.
It was really hard for people to talk about color.
If some client wanted a certain shade of blue for their poster or magazine ad, they'd have to actually send a sample of the color.
You know, our famous thing was cut a piece off their tie and send it into the printing and say, match this color.
And then every time they had to match that color, it would be custom mixing.
They had their own ink formula books and they could get close, but it was very random.
And not just ties, people would hand Larry the wildest of references.
Like here's a piece of avas.
Can you match that color?
Or maybe this leaf from my backyard?
I have heard anecdotally of people bringing in a dog, you know, match.
Yeah, match my dog, you know.
I want this brochure to be the color of phyto.
Yeah, exactly. All this made Larry's job pretty chaotic, right?
This little scrap of a top, hearts of an industry all work together.
Think of like a shipping container.
Shipping containers mostly come in a standard size and shape.
And now the whole supply chain is designed around those standard sized shipping containers.
From the cargo ships to the cranes to the ports to the trucks.
And now a lot of times standards are created by the government or by a group of companies working together.
But people and companies have also famously fought over whose standards would win out.
Think like VHS versus Betamax.
But in the case of Pantone, Larry was just one guy.
How did he get a standard to succeed?
Two things. First, he made a really thoughtful standard.
He researched which colors were the most commonly used and he narrowed the list down to about 500.
And for each of those colors, he developed an ink recipe for how to reproduce that color consistently.
There would be a number back in those days.
There was called PMS for Pantone Matching System.
PMS, a number and go hanging fruit, you know.
Pretty soon, Larry gets 20 of those 21 smaller ink manufacturers on board with his Pantone color standard.
And from there, it just kind of snowballed.
Because you see, standards benefit from what are called network effects.
The more people in the industry who started to use Pantone's way of talking about color, the more people who wanted to use Pantone's way of talking about color.
Once he got a certain amount of US ink makers on board, then he hopped on the plane and he started in Europe and met with the ink companies there and did the same thing and got them to sign on and continued to get us onto the Middle East and then to Asia and then back.
And because Larry was one of the first people to try to standardize this industry, he was quickly able to get everybody around the world to use his system.
By 1968, he'd succeed it.
He turned Pantone into an industry standard.
And this is when Larry and the Pantone color system faced its biggest test, copycats.
Now, colors that create a system that's protectable and that's copied.
And the judge in this lawsuit sided with Pantone.
The judge said Pantone was not copywriting or trying to own the rainbow.
They had created a system.
It created a standard. And that was really just the watershed moment that just said, okay, we have a court tested copy right on the system and don't mess with us.
Since that lawsuit in 1968, Pantone has basically had a monopoly on us from CBC and NPR's embedded.
And that's what we call tested.
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OK, so it has been about 60 years since Larry Herbert first created the Pantone color standard.
And let us just show you how important this has become to the day-to-day workings of the real world.
We are in an industrial part of Queens, New York, walking into what's called a die house.
This is Christian drink water, owner of this place that dies fabric for customers like Calvin Klein, Mark Jacobs, Thierry Wang, big, big fashion houses.
And this die house, imaginative industrial linger mat, with what looks like washing machines agitating clothes back and forth with different colored dides.
One of the machines was overflowing with maybe the pinkest pink I've ever seen in my life.
It looked like a hefty abysmal water.
I see just get ruined, my clothes get ruined, so.
You made a bold choice with the light.
Yeah, luckily I own a die house so I could just dot the pause.
The movie, when Piglet is in shadow, or what if Christian screen has different color settings?
This is where the Pantone standard comes in.
And they could just send me an email that says we want this to match Pantone 15-1626.
I can reference my book and we're looking at the same exact thing.
And so these days almost every brand you can think of talks about themselves in the language that Pantone invented.
Take Targets, Red, Bulls, I logo.
That is Pantone 186. Netflix is red though.
That's Pantone 1795c. But codec red, that is Pantone 485c.
And each of these reds refers to a specific code that you can look up in the Pantone books and color palettes.
Right. And there used to be this official kilogram that sat in a vault in Paris and this was the one kilogram to rule all the kilograms.
These Pantone books are like that.
They are the definitive authority on what any of these colors look like.
We wanted to be in the presence of one of these books to hold it in our hand.
You have a book here. Yeah.
We have several. Christian grabs a couple books off a messy shelf.
This one I haven't used in a long time.
Oh wow. Pantone books are thick binders full of thousands of these little fabrics watches each the size of a stamp.
These are physical cotton chips.
You see like it's the truest to color and doesn't become subjective.
And this is what I reference to the most.
These books, they are like seeing that official kilogram in person.
But unlike the official kilogram, this book, this color standard is controlled by a corporation trying to make money.
And the main way they make money is by selling these books.
The books that Christian uses cost $3,000 brand new.
This is even a different book.
Bigger, fancier versions like the ones that include a set of plastic chips, those go for $9,000.
They're very expensive and it is a lot to keep having to buy new ones all the time.
Seats, Pantones, colors and codes.
And when you add it as a plug into Adobe, suddenly your colors are back, same as before.
Stewart says free tone was immediately popular.
It's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
And Stewart does know that what he's doing is legally iffy.
But to him, it's almost like an act of civil disobedience.
Has anyone from Pantone ever reached out to you about this?
No, it's really weird. I've had nothing from Pantone at all.
Not one thing. Stewart says he'd actually welcomed the opportunity to go to court, to stand up there and ask, is it fair for Pantone to hold a monopoly on the language of color?
This is the question at the heart of this story.
If you look at the standards that are out there in the world, a lot are overseen by a government or a nonprofit organization.
For instance, a nonprofit manages the standard for USB plugs.
The US government created the original standard for how color TV was broadcast over the air.
Has any of this ever made you think, well, maybe we've met Pantone wields its monopoly power in an unfair way?
The reality is, is you don't have to use Pantone.
You could use whatever system works the best.
And you know, we talk about a standard.
Pantone became a de facto standard because it worked the best.
But it's also true that when everybody else in your industry adopts a standard like Pantone, you kind of have to use that standard too.
By the way, we did reach out to Adobe for the story.
Adobe eventually made it possible for those blacked out files to show up in color again.
But they're not official Pantone colors.
Now Pantone is not just the owner of this color standard.
They also have all these side hustles.
They work with big brands to create custom colors.
Like for the minions movie, Pantone created minion yellow.
Yeah, and actually when we began reporting this story, I actually had this dream for Planet Money to have one of those colors.
For Planet Money to have our own spot on the Pantone system.
Maybe even right next to the minion.
Right where we belong. Yeah, so we asked Pantone and after three months, there's still been no word.
So the other day, we asked someone else who knows a thing or two about colors.
We were wondering if you might consider making us a color.
I'd love to meet you a color.
It'd be really fun. Yeah, of course.
Amazing. Oh, great. Okay, awesome.
Stuart isn't just the creator of that digital color palette, free tone.
He also has a whole line of paints and pigments.
So we're working with Stuart to get a Planet Money color made.
The question is now what color?
Aren't we in like a solid green territory?
The planet is mostly blue ocean.
Is it gold? I'm thinking gold.
Listeners, send us your ideas.
There's a link to a survey in the show notes.
Ray, should we pick gray?
It's gray, a good color.
Kenny, I should say, is color blind.
That might be relevant.
Yeah, I don't know why I'm in this meeting.
This episode was produced by Willa Rubin with help from James Sneed, who's edited by Jess Jang and fact-checked by Sierra Huattas, engineering by Debbie Dottry with help from Carl Kraft.
Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
Will thinks as well to Mary Claire Pete, Peter Hayden, Kelly James, Dan Johnston, Avery Truffleman, Laurie Pressman, Hillary Tamer, and Jody Rosen.
I'm Samuel O'Horz Kessler, and I'm Jeff Guowe.
This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
On this week's episode of Wild Card, poet Nikki Giovanni says you can choose your family.
I recommend dogs. For their paper, their intelligence, and they always love you.
I'm Rachel Martin. Join us for NPR's Wild Card.
