Color is fun. It represents some of the more fluid things in life: rolling waves, green pastures, rainbows, chaos, noise, vibrancy. But to Larry Herbert, a young man who grew up in Depression-era Brooklyn, it was a nuisance. Working in the print and manufacturing trade, he found colors were never consistent, always slightly off. Practicality, not creativity, led him to invent the Pantone Matching System. It meant that a manufacturer in Tokyo and a manufacturer in New York City were guaranteed to have the same color if one of them mentioned a specific number, such as “Pantone 186” (a red Diana Vreeland would have loved). A new documentary by Patrick Creadon pulls back the curtain on the “King of Color,” who is 96 and has somehow remained largely unknown. —Elena Clavarino