Collins rebrand for Muse Group channels the invisible phenomena of experiencing music

Here’s how Collins got around to creating some of the hottest design of the year. It starts with Muse Group, developers of the immensely popular apps Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseClass. Despite the over 400 million people using its tools to learn, play and create music, these powerful tools had no cohesive brand identity. With no shared voice or central purpose to their identity, Collins stepped in to unify their products with musical, kinetic typeface and rebrand visuals to close what Muse Group calls “the gap”, a space between one’s ambition and their ability to express it, a place where 90 per cent of guitarists stay indefinitely. It’s Nice That talked to Nick Ace, chief creative officer at Collins, and Rebeka Arce, creative director, about the feat of making an invisible brand visible.

“Working closely with the good people at Muse, we all immersed ourselves in experimental music notation, spectrograms, oscillator waveforms, and other visual representations of sound,” says Rebeka. “We created emotive visual modules that pulse and harmonise like notes on a staff. These became the foundation for a custom typeface – Muse Display – as well as a new graphic language, product icons, and motion systems.”

Implementing gravitational waves and Labanotation (a system for analysing and recording human movement) Collins didn’t want to just visualise music literally, but represent the essence of the human relationship with music – the physicality and emotional experience of feeling music rather than observing it. Traditional musical genres such as rock, rap or classical oversimplify the spectrum of musical experience, even in our “post-genre” present. “Instead, we centered our thinking around the baseline physics of sound itself: sonic reverberation and the lingering presence of music that persists after an initial sound wave,” says Nick. “This shift from expected, genre-inspired iconography to a more universal language of sound vibration allowed us to create a visual system that speaks to music’s essential nature rather than its familiar categorical boundaries.”

Collins aimed to visualise Muse Group’s unified goal, something they call “creative fluency”, where playing and creating music becomes second nature – technical barriers dissolve and musicianship becomes as easy as listenership. Fusing the identities across this ecosystem promises to help the brand grow for years to come as well as set itself apart from other brands. “Too many brands in the music tech sector highlight features, but lack emotional impact,” says Rebeka. “Muse’s identity tries to capture those feelings: the rhythm, the drive, the energy, and the flow that come with musical expression, bringing it all together into a charged, living system.”

One of the issues, Nick argues, in the design industry is a fixation on branding tech as “software from the future”, relying on literal representations from the 1980s that have created dull and homogeneous visuals that shy away from the timelessness of creativity. “Instead of showcasing technical specs or outlandish interfaces, we centered the brand around the raw experience of musical creation, itself,” says Nick. “Rather than depicting the tools, we visualized the outcomes—the resonance, the harmony, the creative breakthrough that happens when technical barriers disappear.”

Another concept that Collins and Muse Group explored was “flexible consistency”, which they communicated through a custom typeface called Muse Display. Each style of the typeface shares the same DNA but presents different personalities through musically inspired details. Sonata, designed for MuseScore, incorporates rounded, elegant curves reminiscent of musical notation, whereas Shred, inspired by Ultimate Guitar, features sharp, angular terminals that reflect the intensity of a guitar solo.

Building their brand identities like a family tree, each visual carried genetics that close the gap between a 15-year-old-guitar player and a 40-year-old composer, creating a community for music appreciators. In Kazimir Malevich’s philosophical framework, the Manifesto of Suprematism, Malevich declares: “To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.” Collins took direct inspiration in this as a team and used this philosophy to create something truly fundamental through geometric abstraction and colour as emotion. Moving away from bored symbology, Collins have caught lightning in a bottle – the same lightning that powers the soul of a guitar, a synthesiser or the very digital audio station that a teenager is using right now to create the next great album.