AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The human eye can detect about a million hues of color. For businesses that deal in precise shades, they turn to a kind of dictionary of color from the company Pantone. But as Planet Money’s Sam Yellowhorse Kesler reports, Pantone’s power over the spectrum raises the question, who can own the rainbow?

SAM YELLOWHORSE KESLER, BYLINE: Stuart Semple is an artist based in the U.K. He makes giant installation pieces and pop art collages with lots of color. Stuart often designs his art on programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, until suddenly, two years ago, he couldn’t.

STUART SEMPLE: One day, I switched my laptop on, and all the colors in the files are black. All the colors are gone.

KESLER: A pop-up attributed the change to Pantone. Stuart decided…

SEMPLE: I’ve got to do something about this. This is just wrong.

KESLER: Stuart was going up against an industry standard. Pantone sets the de facto language of color for fields like art and design. And that language was created 60 years ago by one man.

RICHARD HERBERT: A nice man, but a tough man.

KESLER: This is Richard Herbert, former president of Pantone. He’s talking about his dad, Larry Herbert, the inventor of the Pantone standard. We reached out to Larry for the story. He wasn’t available, and we didn’t hear back from a Pantone spokesperson in time for publication.

Richard says back in the 1960s, his dad, Larry, worked at a printing company, and he noticed this issue. It was really hard for designers and customers to talk about color.

HERBERT: You know, our famous thing was cut a piece off their tie and send it into the printer 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.

KESLER: So in 1963, Larry came up with a solution, the Pantone matching guide. Every color got a code that pointed to a formula, a way to reproduce that color the same every time. Now people could just speak in Pantone codes, no more cutting up ties. Eventually, Pantone became the industry standard. And the more people used it, the more other people had to use it, too. In economics terms, this is called a network effect, and it’s great for businesses like Pantone because once you have a critical mass of users, it’s really hard for people not to use your system.

But some people, like artist Stuart Semple – they don’t love the control Pantone has over colors. Pantone is expensive. Their books can cost thousands of dollars. And back in 2022, the day Photoshop designs turned black, Adobe’s digital license with Pantone had changed. Pantone was now going directly to users and saying, if you want your colors back, you have to pay $15 a month. Stuart was fed up.

SEMPLE: I created a color palette of my own that was extremely similar to theirs.

KESLER: He basically made a free copy of Pantone’s palette. He calls his version FREETONE. It’s this plug-in for Adobe which adds your colors back, same as before. As an artist, Stuart wants people to question whether it’s fair that Pantone has a monopoly over the color standard. Other standards like USB ports or the metric system tend to be managed by governments or nonprofits. This one for color printing is run by one company. Richard Herbert, former president, says nobody has to use Pantone.

HERBERT: You could use whatever system works the best. And, you know, we talk about a standard. Pantone became a de facto standard ’cause it worked the best.

KESLER: And it has maintained that standard for so long because it is the standard.

Sam Yellowhorse Kesler, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.