Icon DESIGN System
Music Genre Waveforms
Feature 1
I set myself a brief to visualise music genres without using any literal instruments. The idea was “Genre Waveforms” – each cube is a tiny 3D landscape built from audio-like data, where the shape, rhythm and colour behave the way the music sounds.
The system is strict. Every genre lives on the same isometric cube, built from a dense grid of vertical bars, on a deep blue background. Grid, camera angle, lighting and shadow are fixed. What changes is the behaviour: techno ramps into a mechanical build and drop, house shows a 4 x 4 terrace pattern, drum and bass explodes into a rainbow storm of spikes, ambient collapses into low monochrome dunes, while rock and punk push the grid to clipping, erosion and jagged cliffs.
I used AI to explore volumetric “sound sculptures”, then refined the strongest into a consistent family with shared tokens for height range, colour spectrum and density. The result is a flexible icon language that can scale from UI glyphs to hero artwork, and that instantly signals genre through form, rhythm and palette rather than clichés like guitars or headphones.
