SalesSheet started with a generic blue. It was the blue that ships with every UI kit, the blue that every SaaS product defaults to, the blue that says "we are a software company" without saying anything else. Blue is safe. Blue is professional. Blue is also completely forgettable. When every CRM, project manager, and productivity tool uses the same blue, none of them have a visual identity. They have a color that was never intentionally chosen.
We needed a color that was ours. Not a slight variation of someone else's blue, not a trendy gradient, not a color that would feel dated in 18 months. We needed a color that would become synonymous with SalesSheet the way Intercom owns orange, Slack owns aubergine, and Linear owns a precise shade of blue-violet. The color we chose is #32BAB0 — a warm, confident teal.
A brand color is not a decoration. It is a signal. Every time a user sees your color, they should know they are in your product without reading a single word.
We evaluated 23 candidate colors against five criteria:
#32BAB0 scored highest on all five. It is teal — warmer than cyan, cooler than green, distinct from both. No major CRM uses teal as a primary brand color. It passes WCAG AA against both white (#FFFFFF, ratio 3.2:1 for large text) and near-black (#111827, ratio 8.4:1). It works as a solid button fill, a text color, a border accent, a subtle 10% opacity background tint, and an icon color. It reads consistently across Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android displays.
A brand color is only effective if it flows consistently through every touchpoint. Here is where #32BAB0 appears in SalesSheet:
Every primary button in the product uses teal as its background color. "Save Contact," "Create Deal," "Send Email," "Start Call" — they all share the same teal. This creates a consistent visual language: teal means "do this thing." Users learn the pattern unconsciously. After a few days of use, their eyes are drawn to teal elements because they know that is where the action is.
The active page in the sidebar, the selected tab in a tab bar, and the current step in a multi-step flow are all indicated with teal. This includes the bottom tab bar on mobile, where the active tab's icon fills with teal while inactive tabs remain gray. The teal acts as a wayfinding signal, always telling users where they are.
Our in-app support chat widget uses a teal accent for the chat bubble, the send button, and the online status indicator. When users see teal in the chat, they associate it with help — with SalesSheet being present and responsive. The chat header is teal on white, creating a clear visual boundary between the chat and the rest of the product.
Meeting events in the calendar view use a teal left-border accent. Confirmed meetings show solid teal. Tentative meetings show a teal outline. Cancelled meetings show a strikethrough with a muted teal. The teal variants create a hierarchy within a single color family that communicates status without requiring text labels.
The task sidebar uses teal checkboxes and progress indicators. When a task is completed, the checkbox fills with teal and the task text gets a subtle strikethrough. The progress bar at the top of the task panel fills with teal as tasks are completed, creating a satisfying visual feedback loop that encourages completion.
The deal pipeline uses teal as the accent for the currently selected stage column. When you click a stage to filter or expand it, the stage header highlights in teal, drawing your eye to the active context. Deal cards in that stage get a 3px teal top border, connecting them visually to their stage header.
A single hex value is not enough for a complete design system. We generated a 10-step teal scale from near-white to near-black, with #32BAB0 sitting at the 500 position (the middle, full-saturation value). The scale is used throughout the product:
Changing a brand color is not a find-and-replace operation. Our previous blue was embedded in component styles, SVG icons, Tailwind config, email templates, marketing pages, and third-party integrations (Intercom widget, Stripe checkout). The rollout took three days:
--teal and all Tailwind color tokens. This immediately changed every element that used the design system correctly.A brand color that only exists in your marketing materials is not a brand color. It is a decoration. A true brand color lives in every pixel of your product, from the largest hero section to the smallest checkbox.
Today, #32BAB0 is SalesSheet. It is the first thing you see when you log in and the last thing you see when you close the tab. It is warm, distinct, accessible, and ours. That is what a brand color should be.