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Pantone’s professional color matching kits can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars to upwards of several thousand dollars for pros who work in industries like fashion and interiors. Its newest, though, is a single-fan book with more than 600 spot colors, and it’s priced at just $99. Pantone for beginners. Pantone on Thursday announced its Pantone Capsule: Signature Edition. Housed in a collectible, cylindrical case that wouldn’t look out of place in a Sephora, the guide is a sort of Pantone 101 that come on coated and uncoated paper stock with colors selected from across more than 60 years of Pantone history. “At Pantone, we have spent a lot of time speaking with our creative community to understand how their roles have changed, the tools they need, and how to best serve them,” Ora Solomon, Pantone’s vice president of product and engineering, said in a statement. “As a result, we wanted to expand the opportunities for our design community to have a more accessible way to use our guides, especially at the beginning of their careers, and help them create with confidence.” [Photo: Pantone] The colors for the collection were chosen for their utility, based on Pantone data about the most popular and widely used colors. There’s Pantone 6104 C, a sapphire blue that’s one of its newest colors, and retro throwbacks, like the bright yellow Pantone 102 C and the purple-pink Pantone 238, which were popular in the 1980s and ’90s. The Pantone capsule represents something of a departure for the color-matching company’s product releases, since it usually adds colors to its existing standard formula guide instead of curating new guides. The idea for it came from Pantone’s creative listening initiative to work directly with creatives in order to improve its products. After being previewed with designers at Adobe Max in October, Pantone says the reaction was enthusiastic. Pantone imagines the guide as a primer on the Pantone Matching System for students and content creators, or a portable companion for freelancers between clients and project. Or even just for fun, since it was designed to be collectible. While Pantone’s business is verifying colors, initiatives likes its long-running Color of the Year and collaborations with celebrities, bands, and brands have made Pantone a popular authority on color. An affordably priced, mobile color-matching starter kit that also happens to look good on a shelf manifests that ethos in a physical, accessible way.
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Data collected from 35 American cities showed a 21% decrease in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025, translating to about 922 fewer homicides last year, according to a new report from the independent Council on Criminal Justice.The report, released on Thursday, tracked 13 crimes and recorded drops last year in 11 of those categories including carjackings, shoplifting, aggravated assaults and others. Drug crimes saw a small increase over last year and sexual assaults stayed even between 2024 and 2025, the study found.Experts said cities and states beyond those surveyed showed similar declines in homicides and other crimes. But they said it’s too early to tell what is prompting the change even as elected officials at all levels both Democrats and Republicans have been claiming credit.Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the council a nonpartisan think tank for criminal justice policy and research said that after historic increases in violence during the COVID-19 pandemic, this year brought historic decreases. The study found some cities recorded decades-low numbers, with the overall homicide rate dropping to its lowest in decades.“It’s a dramatic drop to an absolutely astonishing level. As we celebrate it we also need to unpack and try to understand it,” Gelb said. “There’s never one reason crime goes up or down.”The council collects data from police departments and other law enforcement sources. Some of the report categories included data from as many as 35 cities, while others because of differences in definitions for specific crimes or tracking gaps, include fewer cities in their totals. Many of the property crimes in the report also declined, including a 27% drop in vehicle thefts and 10% drop in shoplifting among the reporting cities.The council’s report showed a decrease in the homicide rate in 31 of 35 cities including a 40% decrease or more in Denver, Omaha, Nebraska, and Washington. The only city included that reported a double-digit increase was Little Rock, Arkansas, where the rate increased by 16% from 2024.Gelb said the broad crime rate decreases have made some criminologists question historic understandings of what drives trends in violent crime and how to battle it.“We want to believe that local factors really matter for crime numbers, that it is fundamentally a neighborhood problem with neighborhood level solutions,” he said. “We’re now seeing that broad, very broad social, cultural and economic forces at the national level can assert huge influence on what happens at the local level.”Republicans, many of whom called the decrease in violent crime in many cities in 2024 unreliable, have rushed to say that tough-on-crime stances like deploying the National Guard to cities like New Orleans and the nation’s capital, coupled with immigration operation surges, have all played a role in this year’s drops.However, cities that saw no surges of either troops or federal agents saw similar historic drops in violent and other crimes, according to the Council’s annual report.Democratic mayors are also touting their policies as playing roles in the 2025 decreases.Jens Ludwig, a public policy professor and the Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, stressed that many factors can contribute to a reduction in crime, whether that’s increased spending on law enforcement or increased spending on education to improve graduation rates.“The fact that in any individual city, we are seeing crime drop across so many neighborhoods and in so many categories, means it can’t be any particular pet project in a neighborhood enacted by a mayor,” Ludwig said. And because the decrease is happening in multiple cities, “it’s not like any individual mayor is a genius in figuring this out.”He said while often nobody knows what drives big swings in crime numbers, the decrease could be in part due to the continued normalization after big spikes in crime for several years during the pandemic. A hypothesis that stresses the declines might not last.“If you look at violent crime rates in the U.S., it is much more volatile year to year than the poverty rate, or the unemployment rate; It is one of those big social indicators that just swings around a lot year to year,” Ludwig said. “Regardless of credit for these declines, I think it’s too soon for anybody on either side of this to declare mission accomplished.” Claudia Lauer, Associated Press
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A new campaign launches today against AIs sticky fingers on copyrighted material. The Human Artistry Campaigns Stealing Isnt Innovation movement launches today with over 800 signatories. Those include many Hollywood actors, including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as well as writers such as Jodi Picoult and Roxane Gay, and musicians like Cyndi Lauper and They Might be Giants. The campaign has a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress. It’s theftplain and simple. Many record labels, news outlets, and other creative entities have partnered with AI companies in recent years, despiteor possibly in response totheir propensity to mine copyrighted materials. Creatives have fought (and continue to fight) for protections, such as in the lengthy Writers Guild of America (WGA) and Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes in 2023. However, the Stealing Isnt Innovation campaign isnt against AI, it just wants creatives to be part of the process. A better way existsthrough licensing deals and partnerships, some AI companies have taken the responsible, ethical route to obtaining the content and materials they wish to use, the letter reads. It is possible to have it all. We can have advanced, rapidly developing AI and ensure creators’ rights are respected. The Stealing Isnt Innovation campaign will promote itself through ads on social media and in news publications. Creatives in the U.K. have taken comparable action The latest campaign focuses on American creators and takes a bit of a nationalist stance in its opening line: Americas creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth, and exports. But artists across the U.K. have launched similar movements in response to AIs access to copyrighted material, including a law that would require creatives to opt out of letting AI use their work. In February 2025, the Make It Fair campaign ran in hundreds of publications to raise awareness of the threat of AI to creative industries. The same month saw over 1,000 musicians, from Kate Bush to The Clash, release a silent album titled Is This What We Want?with the 12 tracks spelling out: The British government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies. In May, creatives across industries took action again. In an open letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, everyone from Elton John to Kazuo Ishiguro voiced their opposition to the proposed copyright law. The U.K. government is set to issue policy proposals on the matter in mid-March.
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