The color monopoly

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2024

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2022, artist Stuart Semple opened up his laptop to find that all his designs had turned black overnight. All the colors, across files on Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator, were gone. Who had taken the colors away? The story of what happened begins with one company, Pantone.

Pantone is known for their Color of the Year forecasts, but they actually make the bulk of their money from selling color reference guides. These guides are the standard for how designers pretty much anywhere talk about color.

On today's show, how did Pantone come to control the language of the rainbow? We look back at the history of Pantone, beginning with the man who made Pantone into 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 Planet Money's color?

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

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On the inheriting podcast if you ask a Filipino American or Asian American who is Patrick
0:05.4	Salver they have no clue Pat Salver was a Filipino civil rights hero but his activism
0:12.1	came at a cost.
0:13.4	The FBI labeled me as a troublemaker.
0:16.6	Now his niece unearth's his legacy.
0:19.3	Listen to inheriting from LAS studios and the NPR network wherever you get your podcasts.
0:25.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:30.0	The day that Stuart Simple decided to become an artist, he was eight years old.
0:35.0	His mom took him to a museum in London and from across the floor of the gallery
0:40.0	he saw this beacon of yellow.
0:42.0	You've never seen color like that before.
0:44.0	The painting was sunflowers by Van Gogh.
0:47.0	They just knocked me sideways.
0:48.0	And I was literally shaking and I think it was the colors that were doing it to me.
0:54.0	Those colors are what inspired Stuart to become an artist.
0:57.0	These days he makes giant installation pieces with bright yellow smiley faces made of steel.
1:02.0	Or he does these pop art collages with lots of
1:04.8	neon colors. Stuart often designs his art on the computer which is why it was a big
1:10.4	deal two years ago when all of his colors disappeared.
1:14.7	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? A company called
1:27.5	Pantone. You see, Pantone owns the color palette that a lot of people use in
1:32.0	programs like, say, Adobe Photoshop or illustrator.
	...

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