The Muse Design System has come a long way over the past few years. It has helped unify design and development across Cisco.com, speed up production workflows, and bring consistency to everything from buttons to full-page layouts. Like any good system, however, it needs to grow with the needs of our teams as well as Cisco’s evolving identity.
That’s why we’re excited to share an early look at what we’re calling Muse 2.0.
A Look Back
Before looking ahead, we want to pause and recognize how far Muse has come. Launched to bring order and consistency to our marketing and editorial experiences on Cisco, Muse has powered thousands of pages and countless creative solutions. It’s helped authors, designers, and developers speak a common language—and get things done faster, and more beautifully.
Muse 2.0 builds on those foundations, offering sharper tools, clearer guidance, and more flexibility for the next generation of digital storytelling.
Why Muse 2.0?
A few key things have been brewing behind the scenes:
- Cisco’s brand colors have evolved, and our current palette no longer reflects the updated visual identity.
- Teams are asking for theme support—light, gray, and dark—to support more flexible layouts and content types.
- Our documentation is fragmented, split across Confluence and AEM, with inconsistent coverage and navigation.
- Our visual language is changing— Cisco is investigating other ways to evolve the brand visual language, and this evolution needs to show up front and center on cisco.com.
Instead of patching the system around the edges, we’re taking this opportunity to step back and realign Muse from the ground up.
A Marketing-Focused System
One thing that makes Muse unique in the design system space is our focus on editorial and marketing experiences, not product UIs. While many systems are built around dashboards, form fields, and data tables, Muse is built for narrative—storytelling, hierarchy, visual richness, and flexibility.
This distinction drives many of our decisions—from how we approach theming, to the patterns we support, to how we document usage for strategists and authors. Muse 2.0 leans even further into that specialty—helping us build a system that’s not just functional, but expressive.
What’s Coming
We’re organizing the Muse 2.0 migration around three core pillars:
1. A Fresh Visual Foundation
We’re adopting Cisco’s new brand color palette. This includes updated hex values for buttons, text, borders, surfaces, and more—making sure Muse stays visually aligned with our broader brand presence.
We’re fast-tracking a Color Patch to release on May 23rd to get this into production quickly.
After that, we’re reviewing our foundational design language and seeing how we can evolve it into the next generation of Muse and Cisco.
2. Theme Flexibility
Light, gray, and dark themes are becoming essential for modular page layouts and accessibility. Muse 2.0 will introduce full theme token support, enabling patterns and components to adapt across different backgrounds without hacks or overrides.
3. A Modern Documentation Experience
We’re migrating all documentation to a new Starlight-powered site (a markdown based documentation platform)—faster, searchable, and fully open to contributors. Whether you’re an AEM author, a strategist building pages, or a designer, we want to make it easier to find what you need and understand how to use Muse effectively. We’ll continue to feature live examples of AEM pattern and templates, accessible via links on the new site.
What This Means for You
Muse 2.0 is designed to make the system:
- More usable for site builders and strategists
- More flexible for designers and developers
- More aligned with Cisco’s evolving brand direction
You can expect:
- Better support for complex layouts and mixed content
- A more accessible and on-brand experience
- Clearer, centralized documentation going forward
A Clean Break from 1.0
As we move forward, we’re treating Muse 2.0 as a true evolution—not just a patch.
New Figma Libraries
Rather than branching from our existing 1.0 files (which can get messy in Figma), we’ll be creating brand-new Figma libraries for Muse 2.0. These will reflect updated token structures, visual styles, and theme support—built from the ground up.
The existing 1.0 files will remain available for ongoing projects, but will enter a maintenance mode—receiving only critical fixes, accessibility adjustments, or bug resolutions. All new patterns and enhancements will be directed toward the 2.0 libraries.
Monorepo Migration in GitHub
We’re also migrating our design system repos into a single monorepo, making it easier to manage shared tokens, component logic, and documentation in one place. This shift sets us up for:
- Better theming support
- Faster development workflows
- Easier onboarding for contributors
Over time, we’ll phase out the 1.0 repo structure, with clear guidance and support along the way.
Injecting a New Visual Language
Muse 2.0 isn’t just about tokens and themes—it’s also a chance to refresh and modernize our core visual language. We’ll be working to evolve how Muse expresses itself: more flexibility, more focus, more edge.
How We’re Building It
We’re building Muse 2.0 with the same principles we preach: start small, iterate, stay transparent. We’ll share early drafts, involve stakeholders at every stage, and document the journey—so teams aren’t just handed a system, they’re part of it.
You’ll see changelogs, sneak peeks, and pattern updates roll out as we go—never all at once, never behind closed doors.
How You Can Get Involved
This is a team effort—and your feedback matters. Want to preview early token work? Join a design review? Help shape the structure of our new docs? Reach out. We’ll also host a few open sessions and reviews as 2.0 rolls out, so keep an eye out for invites.
The more voices we hear from, the better the system becomes—for everyone.
What’s Next
We’re starting with the Color Patch on May 23, followed by phased rollouts for theme support and documentation updates.
You’ll see regular updates from us along the way—and when Muse 2.0 launches, it won’t be a surprise. It’ll be something we’ve built together.