Cosy Jazz: Abstract Urban Landscape

To design a vision of urban life in 2030/2040, not as a prediction, but as a proposition. What would a city look like if it were built around human expression rather than productivity? The answer arrived not through architecture, but through music. Jazz, specifically the aching warmth of Gary B.B. Coleman's "The Sky is Crying," became the conceptual key, a sound that carries both the weight of the blues and the freedom of improvisation. The design mission was to translate that emotional register into a visual landscape: warm, stylised, and impossible to mistake for anywhere but a city that believes in art.

The process began with primary research, photographs taken across Johannesburg captured how real South African urban environments hold geometry, depth, and light. This grounded the composition before the moodboard refined the visual direction: Jazz illustration references showing exaggerated figurative movement and warm collisions of terracotta and teal, run alongside minimalist flat architecture. The two poles defined a palette of twenty swatches covering khaki golds, burnt siennas, dusty pinks, and an anchoring teal.

Sketching resolved three competing composition ideas before landing on Arrangement 3: a central figure on a monumental plinth, buildings receding into a one-point perspective on either side, road lines pulling the eye toward the statue. The figure is a jazz musician mid-performance, arms thrown back, saxophone lifted, was developed through life-drawing practice poses before being translated into digital linework. The decision to work flat and cartoonish came from studying Regular Show and Teen Titans: both shows use simplified form and bold colour to create characters that read clearly against complex architectural backgrounds.

The digital build in Illustrator moved through six documented stages, from skeletal linework to a fully coloured final. Buildings were kept as geometric solids, colour-coded to create depth through value rather than perspective. Diagonal road lines and wavy sound-wave shapes behind the buildings added movement without noise. The statue's plinth bears the inscription "Cosy Jazz" — the client mark embedded directly into the world. The figure itself was rendered apart from the warm city palette, staying in near-monochrome to ensure it reads as monument rather than character, a permanent fixture of this imagined city rather than a visitor passing through.