How Makemusic rebranded its app in a six week cycle

Teams don’t move faster just because a new logo and a color drops in. They move faster when culture, tools, and structure align. This is the real challenge behind a rebrand, the system that can absorb meaningful changes and ship them without sacrificing quality or time.

At Makemusic, design work was historically scattered in different tools. Teams operated in silos and workflows were somewhat defined by department.

In that setup, delivering value was difficult as:

• Unstructured and fragmented organization reduced visibility between product, marketing, and engineering, making brand coherence hard to maintain.

• Shared assets with no clear ownership slowed adoption and created inconsistencies.

• Limited control over global changes dragged collaboration and delayed delivery.

To provide a better support, the first major step was reorganizing the design repository. Consolidating files into a single tool and structuring them like a directory tree: “teams” as folders, “projects” as scopes, and files as versions.

With a global file structure and a system of visible tags on its cover, everyone could navigate work at the same level of information and be in sync of the design work status: launched, in progress or just an archive record.

As design libraries played a quite important role centralizing shared assets, a file ownership policy was introduced. Assigning roles as owner, editor, user defined clear responsibilities and accountability, ensuring consistency and speed across contributions.

Component updates to improve major visual and interactive hierarchy. Relevance was simplified, reducing action roles and sharpening focus on primary and destructive actions. Main actions were tied back to the brand’s interactive tint.

These were previous initiatives paying off in a daily basis. Under the hood, they quietly mitigating the risk of turning the app rebrand into a painful, months-long grind.

But what happened exactly during the 6 week cycle? This is how Harmonica, our design system was leveraged to introduce, plan, and automate changes. The plan roll out, by updating the most important files among the design repository: design foundation libraries tied to our token pipeline to automate changes.

Design tokens reshaped how interfaces approached color, typography, iconography and imagery. The orange palette inherited from SmartMusic was replaced to fix the accessibility flaws that we were dealing with. Instead, we tested a tint that could most of issues for the visually impaired.

An extensible typography token set replaced the legacy typeface with Inter. This new set supported both product and brand exposure.

Iconography and imagery were setup for automated delivery through our tokens pipeline, this would be a game changer for all teams.

Some results of these background works,

450 design tokens

Automated with the new infrastructure overhaul.

16 design libraries

Newly introduced to reduce inconsistencies and increase progressive maintenance.

6 global components updated

Through automated design token contributions.

Rebrands are always challenging. But, file management brought visibility, scalability, and version control across disciplines, while design system automation provided control and overhead. Together, these foundations made it possible to deliver the project in just six weeks.