The color we almost didn't ship.

QuickPeach is a launchpad. The product is small — one hotkey, a query bar, a sticky note — and we knew from day one that the brand had to fit in a 32×32 favicon without losing its identity. That's the only constraint that mattered. Everything else we picked from there.

The three constraints

1. Distinct at 16px. The browser-tab favicon. If a user can't pick QuickPeach out of a tab strip in 200ms, the brand failed before the product opened.
2. Warm, not corporate. The product feels like a desk — paper, hand-drawn notes, half-finished thoughts. Cold blue ("productivity blue") and aggressive red ("alerts!") were both disqualified in the first ten minutes.
3. One color does all the work. No gradients in the brand mark, no two-tone badges, no rainbow sub-palette. The first shipping icon was a single peach square with a white "p". If a single hue couldn't carry the favicon, we'd add complexity; otherwise we wouldn't.

The candidates we killed

Before peach we tried four colors. Each got a 32×32 mockup and a side-by-side test against Chrome's default tab strip.

The palette we actually shipped

Four colors. That's the whole palette. The brand mark uses the first two (#F48C5B for the keycap, #CC6D3F for the folded corner) and the product uses the last two (sticky-note cream for the canvas, near-white for the ink). Every other shade in the app is a tint of those four.

The metaphor that almost killed peach

The original concept was a "soft peach keycap". A keyboard key, but peach-colored, with a folded corner suggesting a sticky note. We almost dropped the fold because it made the icon less legible at 16px. We kept it because the fold is the only thing that distinguishes QuickPeach from any other warm-colored app icon — it tells you the product has a paper half, not just a keycap half.

If you can't tell the difference between QuickPeach and, say, a generic productivity launcher at 16px, the fold has done its job. If you can tell, the fold is too loud. We tested both. The fold won.

Fonts do the rest

Three typefaces, each with a job:

• Hanken Grotesk — the chrome.

  A humanist sans for the UI. Warmer than Inter, less precious than Geist. Used for the launchpad input, the menus, the dropdowns.

• Patrick Hand — the desk.

  A handwriting face for the sticky notes themselves. The whole point of QuickPeach is that the notes look like you wrote them. If the font is too clean, the metaphor breaks.

• JetBrains Mono — the code.

  For snippets, command output, and anything that looks like a terminal. We don't ship a code editor — we ship a launcher that runs commands — so the monospace has to read fast.

What we'd do differently

We picked peach in late 2025, before anyone had used the launchpad. The first 50 users said "I thought it was a notes app", which was wrong but instructive: the brand was doing too much of the work the product should have done. We've since leaned into the keyboard metaphor more (the keycap corners are tighter, the input border is more obviously "type here") and let the sticky-note vibe play second fiddle.

The peach stayed. The hierarchy moved.