The Brief

Each year, since the turn of the millennium, word arrives from on high: Pantone, the self-described world's authority on color, announces its Color of the Year.

On Thursday, Pantone declared "Mocha Mousse" as the color for 2025.

The "evocative soft brown" or "warming rich brown hue," the company said in a press release, "nurtures with its suggestion of the delectable quality of cacao, chocolate and coffee, appealing to our desire for comfort."

In unveiling a hue meant to reflect the culture through the language of color, Pantone also forecasts what's next in design trends.

The earthy color seizes on "a growing movement to align ourselves with the natural world," the release read.

Pantone's Color of the Year is meant to capture the zeitgeist, said Laurie Pressman, vice president of the Pantone Color Institute. At the same time, it's also intended to serve as a cultural antidote.

"It's emblematic of a snapshot in time and it's giving people what they feel they need — that that color can hope to answer," Pressman said. "It's us taking the temperature: What's taking place in the world around us and how does that get expressed into the language of color?"

"And as we were doing our research for this year, what we were really seeing more than anything is people looking for harmony and living a life of harmony," she said, and a need to feel "grounded."

In response to the annual color pick, designers in fashion and interiors, marketers and creators incorporate the pigment into their products to stay on trend. As part of the campaign, brands partner with Pantone, making the company money from owning a color.

That said, you can expect to see a lot more brown around.

But Pantone is not the only company to develop a standardized set of colors, nor the first to put names to colors. So, what makes Pantone such a color expert?

From the start, Pantone recognized the need to portray color accurately. More importantly, it knew how to sell it.

How Pantone set the industry standard

Before it became the color juggernaut it is today, Pantone was a commercial printing company under a different name. When Lawrence Herbert, a print technician with a background in chemistry, was hired by the corporation in the 1950s, he identified a recurring problem in his work.

When requesting printed copies, of brochures or posters, customers struggled to talk about color accurately. To get the color they were after, as Herbert's son Richard, a former president of Pantone, told NPR's Planet Money earlier this year, they would have to send in an actual sample of the color.

"Our famous thing was — cut a piece off their tie and send it into the print and say, match this color," Richard said. "They had their own ink formula books, and they could get close. But it was very random."

In 1963, Lawrence founded the solution. He developed the Pantone Matching System (PMS) as a way to standardize color reproduction so that print copies matched the original, no matter the printing device. He got buy-in from ink makers for his color standard, first in the U.S. and later in Europe and Asia.

Pantone expanded its range of pigments, and by 1968 it became the industry standard.

Pressman credits the shrewd marketer in Herbert for turning Pantone into a widely accepted color system.

"He understood, if this is an issue going on in print, this is an issue that goes through many other different industries," Pressman said.

Clients across a range of industries would knock on Pantone's door to get help with getting their color uniform, often before Pantone had developed a way to do so. There was a need in the market for custom color development and Pantone adapted, according to the company's vice president.

As other industries, such as the fashion and home markets, turned to Pantone to get the right color match, the company branched out from paper into textiles and created new color formats that could translate to a variety of materials. Today, its library of colors numbers upwards of 10,000 different colors.

The Color of the Year campaign, aided by its public relations arm, became another opportunity for Pantone to sell its proprietary colors, through the formulation books and color palettes it sells, or brand deals and partnerships.

Some of its famous trademarked colors belong to big brands. Both Target's bold red and Tiffany & Co.'s robin egg blue belong to the Pantone color family.

Pantone's precursors are rooted in the need to describe the natural world

A color chosen to correspond to the natural world is fitting, considering the history of modern color systems.

Robert Ridgway

(

Smithsonian Archives

)

Before Pantone turned its color standard into a big business, some of the first modern color systems came from naturalists trying to identify and differentiate bird species or flowers in reference works known as color dictionaries.

Color systems date back to at least the 17th century, but in the 19th century, an ornithologist named Robert Ridgway took issue with some of the existing nomenclature of colors, according to Daniel Lewis, who authored The Feathery Tribe, a biography of Ridgway.

In his 1912 self-published work, titled Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, an expansion of his first color book of 1886, Ridgway wrote that "the nomenclature of colors remains vague and, for practical purposes, meaningless, thereby seriously impeding progress in almost every branch of industry and research."

He decried the nondescriptive and befuddling names of popular colors, wrote Lewis, including "baby blue," "London smoke," "ashes of roses" and "elephant's breath."

Ridgway's color dictionary, with over 1,000 colors, included hues that referenced birds, like "Jay Blue," while others derived from fruits — "Apple Green" — or the natural environment, as in "Storm Gray."

His color book "evolved into the Pantone color chart," according to Lewis. "Ridgway's Colors" are still used today by mycologists, philatelists and food colorists, according to Lewis' 2012 book.

But his color mixing system was technically flawed, subject to the whims of the natural elements, and never became widely adopted.

An article in Hyperallergic, an online arts magazine, from 2016 cites a 1985 critique published by the Beta Beta Beta Biological Society: "Color Standards lacks precise descriptions of how to reproduce the colors. In addition to this problem, Ridgway chose some pigments that were not as permanent as he had hoped, but were affected by humidity, abrasion, and hue shift."

Another edge Pantone has on its competitors is that it knows how to tell stories about color and arrange them in an accessible way.

"You can't copyright a word. But when you organize words in a specific way, it tells a story and a unique story. The same is true with color. You can't copyright a color. But, you know, if you create this arrangement of colors that creates a system, that's protectable, and that's copyrightable."

Because its color system is protected, graphic designers, dye manufacturers and others working in the world of color have been stymied. In 2022, for example, when Pantone's deal with Adobe ended, a paywall went up for the Pantone colors in Photoshop; if you weren't willing to pay a monthly fee, the colors turned black.

Still, according to Pantone, plenty of other people are willing to pay. 

"You have more and more people — as we live in this visual culture — wanting guidance," Pressman said. "So much money rests on these decisions."

Lineage Logistics has removed all food waste inside the Boyle Heights cold storage that burned down in June, the company and air quality officials said this afternoon.

Now, Lineage has seven days to remove debris, power wash and disinfect certain areas.

The fire started on June 17 and burned for about a week, displacing many Boyle Heights residents and causing widespread air quality issues across the region.

Then putrid odor from an estimated 88 million pounds of food rotting inside the facility began to blanket Boyle Heights and surrounding communities.

Lineage said total cleanup cost is expected to run more than $100 million.

"The City gave Lineage 45 days to remove the biohazard food waste; today is day 60 on the City’s timeline," said L.A. City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes Boyle Heights, in a statement today.

The food waste removal, Jurado added, "does not erase two months of odors, pests, and disruption."

South Coast AQMD said it has received more than 4,900 odor complaints from surrounding communities since July 12 and has issued 38 notices of public health and safety code violations.

Last week, a L.A. City Council committee voted to withhold permits to rebuild the warehouse, pending a full investigation by the fire department. That motion heads to the full City Council for consideration.

In a last-minute move, state legislators added language to a bill on Friday evening that street safety advocates say would threaten a long-planned project to slow speeding cars on Forest Lawn Drive near Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

The proposal, which would amend a larger bill if approved, targets projects that would reduce lanes on roads that provide access to “two or more adjacent cemeteries” in cities with populations over 2 million. Los Angeles is the only city in California large enough to meet that requirement.

Since 2022, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the city council office of Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, have studied and planned to reduce the number of lanes along a one-mile stretch of Forest Lawn Drive. The proposal would cut the number of lanes to three — two through-lanes and one center turn lane.

The stretch of road is the point of entry for Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills location and Mount Sinai Memorial Park. The cemeteries are home to the graves of famous actors such as Debbie Reynolds and Brittany Murphy, at Forest Lawn, and comedians Don Rickles and Bob Saget at Mount Sinai.

Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries, which operates a chain of cemeteries including the Hollywood Hills location, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against the project at the state and local levels, according to an LAist review of lobbying activity. Mount Sinai has also advocated against the project.

“After years of work to finally make this street safer, Sacramento is threatening that progress because powerful interests objected,” Michael Schneider, CEO of Streets for All, said in a post on the street advocacy group’s website condemning the bill’s language. 

The project

According to the L.A. Department of Transportation, Forest Lawn Drive has seen more than 95 collisions, resulting in four deaths, since 2013. Earlier this month, a driver died on the road after their "vehicle collided into a tree and became engulfed in flames,” according to the LAPD.

In response to concerns about speed and safety, the Department of Transportation proposed reducing the number of lanes. The project would also install plastic posts to separate vehicular traffic from cyclists.

Both cemeteries along the affected portion of Forest Lawn Drive have opposed the project from the start, saying the reduction in lanes would “create severe gridlock.”

The city’s analysis of how traffic could be impacted show that the lane reduction would result in a driving delay of about 15 seconds during weekday evening rush hour and by a little more than a minute and a half during weekend peak hours, when traffic is heavier.

The project was set to break ground earlier this summer before state legislators and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass requested city departments to pause work, citing "significant community opposition."

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass during a talk with LAist's public affairs show AirTalk.

(

Courtesy of Loyola Marymount University

)

Bass is facing Raman in a runoff race for the L.A. mayor’s seat this November. The project has become a heated campaign issue with Bass wanting to block the work and Raman supporting the project.

“This last minute amendment to the legislation is clearly meant to stop one road safety project in my district, which is designed to save lives while keeping travel times nearly unchanged for commuters,” Raman said in a statement shared by her campaign.

L.A. Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman at a press conference to speak in support of safety updates following a fatal crash that occurred on Forest Lawn Drive, on Tuesday, August 18, 2026.

(

Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

/

Los Angeles Times

)

The mayor's office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment

The bill

If the added language is approved, State Senate and Assembly bills 194 would require Los Angeles to get approval from the City Council and the mayor and hold a public hearing before reducing “the number of vehicle travel lanes on a street that provides the only access to two or more adjacent cemeteries.”

The proposed bill change comes at the tail end of the legislative session, meaning lawmakers would have until midnight on Aug. 31 to either advance or reject the legislation.

A joint statement from Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai cemeteries said the legislation, if passed, would represent a “momentous victory.”

“The proposed legislation places important safeguards around any future effort to reduce vehicle lanes on the only street providing access to these adjacent cemeteries,” the statement reads.

Lobbying money

Records held by the California Secretary of State show that Forest Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries paid a lobbying firm $125,000 between April and June to advocate the governor’s office and state legislature regarding “transportation issues.” No additional details are available.

Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents the project area, confirmed to LAist that he heard from Governmental Advocates, Inc., the lobbying firm retained by the cemetery. Zbur said the firm and other stakeholders reached out to his office about “the harmful impact of the proposed projects on access to the cemeteries and the surrounding area.”

According to city records, lobbyist Rick Taylor and Associates received $360,000 from a law firm working on behalf of the cemetery between 2025 and 2026. Reports filed with the L.A. City Ethics Commission about the lobbying activity list opposition to the Forest Lawn Drive transportation project as the subject.

Status of the project

According to an Aug. 24 statement from the mayor’s office received before the proposed state language was introduced, alternative plans that preserve the four lanes of traffic and include protected bike lanes “are being reviewed.”

The mayor’s office said the project will break ground following additional community outreach.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

After Inglewood systematically violated state law, a judge reminded the city it was required to release records on police misconduct and use of force — but rolled back an earlier ruling that would have required the records to be posted online.

Barring an appeal, the decision brings five years of legal wrangling between the city and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California closer to a conclusion.

Inglewood won’t face serious consequences for the pattern of breaking California public records law, but the city must pay attorney fees for the ACLU and Trisha Shanklin, who joined the ACLU’s 2021 lawsuit. Inglewood police fatally shot Shanklin’s sister, Kisha Michael, and Marquintan Sandlin in 2016.

LA Superior Court Judge Amy Carter said the city will not have to proactively post the records online, which another judge had previously ordered the city to do for the next three years. Carter said during a Wednesday hearing that such a requirement would have to come from state legislators, not a judge.

Over the last decade, California lawmakers have expanded the public’s right to access police misconduct and use-of-force records, but Inglewood has thrown up a series of obstacles to that access.

The Inglewood City Council voted to destroy decades of internal affairs records in 2018 just weeks before one law went into effect, though Mayor James Butts denied the move was intended to thwart the law, according to LAist. The LA Times reported that the city nearly did it again in 2021 before being blocked by a judge.

This week’s court ruling found the city has routinely violated the law since then, missing deadlines, sharing incomplete records, and at times, failing to provide any documents at all.

Tiffany Bailey, an ACLU attorney, celebrated the decision and said it streamlines the civil rights group’s ability to get police records from the city in the future.

David Loy, an attorney with the First Amendment Coalition, said the case was a great win for the ACLU.

“These kinds of (public records) delays are not uncommon throughout the state,” Loy said. “I hope and believe this is a signal to other cities to get their house in order.”

Attorneys for the city declined to comment on the ruling, and Mayor James Butts did not immediately reply to written questions from The LA Local.

CalMatters maintains a searchable database of police misconduct and use-of-force records called the Police Records Access Project that includes records from the Inglewood Police Department.

The universe is a strange place — filled with exploding stars, ancient galaxies, and unseen worlds. Now, astronomers are about to get a brand new tool to explore it.

The $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled for launch Aug. 30. Named for NASA's first chief astronomer, the observatory is expected to reveal new information about the expansion of the universe and discover multitudes of planets orbiting distant stars.

Roman, as it is known to its friends, has an unusual history. About 15 years ago NASA was making plans to build a space telescope that could, among other things, search for exploding stars known as Type 1A supernovas. These supernovas were used as a kind of cosmological measuring stick to uncover a mysterious force called dark energy that was causing the universe to expand — a discovery that earned the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University says finding more of them would be key to better understanding that expansion.

As NASA was developing plans for this new telescope, a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites.

"The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," Scolnic says, "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'"

NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory.

Scolnic says that the new observatory could fundamentally change the scientific model that astronomers use to understand our universe.

"In the last few years, there have been measurements saying that model might be wrong — and that's something that Roman will absolutely nail, whether the model's right or wrong," he says.

Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster.

"That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

Instead of focusing on a single object, Roman is designed to make catalogs of large swaths of the sky, and McEnery says these catalogs will be available to everyone, not just academics.

"You can be a teacher in a high school in Kentucky and your students have the opportunity to see Roman data at the same time as a professor in Princeton," she says.

One professor eager to get his hands on Roman data is Scott Gaudi at The Ohio State University. Along with colleagues, Gaudi developed a technique for detecting planets around distant stars. It's called gravitational microlensing, and it measures the way those planets bend the starlight that passes them by.

Albert Einstein described the idea in 1936 but thought it would be impractical. New technology has proven him wrong — and Gaudi expects Roman will find tons of planets that way.

"We're looking for planets that are just completely undetectable by any other method," Gaudi says. That includes planets at the center of our galaxy, "that are very analogous to our own solar system planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune."

In addition to new planets, Roman should also reveal new galaxies, helping astronomers to get a better idea of the large-scale structure of the universe.

But predicting what will be Roman's greatest accomplishments over the course of its five-year mission is a tricky business.

"The history of astronomy really has shown that when you get a new capability, and especially a survey capability, you learn something new, something unexpected," says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago. "Often that turns out to be the most exciting part of a new facility. So I am completely open to what this telescope will find."

Copyright 2026 NPR