How Lawrence Herbert Created an Empire of Color, and the Artist Who Challenged It : Planet Money : NPR

In 2022, artist Stuart Semple opened his laptop and discovered that all of his drawings had turned black overnight. All of the colors in files from Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator were gone. Who had removed the colors? The story of what happened begins with one company, Pantone.

Pantone is known for its color predictions of the year, but the company actually makes most of its revenue from selling color reference guides. These guides are the color reference for designers around the world.

On today’s show, how did Pantone come to control the language of the rainbow? We look back at the history of Pantone, starting with the man who made Pantone the industry standard. And we hear from Stuart, who tried to break the color monopoly.

Share your thoughts — What color should we choose to be the color of the planet Silver?

This episode was hosted by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and Jeff Guo, and produced by Willa Rubin with assistance from James Sneed. It was edited by Jess Jiang and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Engineering was done by Debbie Daughtry with assistance from Carl Craft. Alex Goldmark is the executive producer of Planet Money.

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Music: Universal Production Music – “Up All Night”, “So Take Me Home”; Audio Network – “Raise Up.”