How COLLINS Reimagined Branding for Muse Group

COLLINS unites Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, and Audacity under a rhythmic branding system for music software powerhouse Muse Group.

Most musicians know the tools, not the parent company. Muse Group quietly grew into a global leader in music software by backing platforms like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseClass for more than 400 million users across learning, practicing, composing, and performing. Still, the parent brand stayed completely silent. Each product had its own look, voice, and loyal community, creating internal dissonance that teams described as "the gap" between creative ambition and real expression. COLLINS didn't just slap a corporate wrapper over those products. Instead, the team dug into what actually keeps everyday players picking up an instrument: fluency matters much more than virtuosity. Most people don't want to become famous rock stars; they just want music to flow without friction, so COLLINS repositioned the business as a Creative Fluency Company built around momentum rather than perfection.

Rhythmic Geometry in Ecosystem Branding

The visual system hits that note right away. Drawing directly from the abstract geometry of Suprematism, the horizontal structures of sheet music notation, and the physics of sonic vibration, COLLINS built a modular branding language that pulses and resolves on screen. Sharp vector forms crafted in Illustrator lock into rhythmic staff lines before expanding into expressive motion behaviors in After Effects. Nothing in the grid feels static. Every geometric block acts like a visual chord that can compress for a tiny app icon in Figma or stretch across wide festival stages and product launch decks.

That balance between structure and improvisation is hard to pull off. Typography anchors the layouts with crisp grotesk headlines and clean editorial margins, giving the geometric shapes plenty of breathing room to move without overwhelming the interface. When the system rolls out across Audacity, MuseScore, and Ultimate Guitar touchpoints, it doesn't erase what makes each tool distinct. It gives them a shared center of gravity. By turning musical notation and Suprematist form into living software branding, COLLINS shows how an umbrella identity can unify cross-functional teams and guide millions of creators across the creative gap.

See the full project by COLLINS on COLLINS.