Tipos de Rochas & Minerais - kolx & Keith
"Tipos de Rochas & Minerais [Mixtape)" by kolx and Keith, an abstract hip-hop album from 2020, featuring a record cover designed by JOZÁ also known as torajjjosu.
JOZÁ, a Salvador-born art director who was 20 years old at the time, shared in an interview the creative process behind the work. According to him:
I started the development from a feeling that already had a smell, sound and color, but not an image. In the first artworks I worked with collage, placing all the elements that referred me to the concept of the piece: the metaphor of rocks as living bodies, in motion, with sounds and blood currents.
Everything really began to unfold when I started removing the excess. I tried to translate the meaning of all the elements that guide the concept into a single one. Since the idea is that rocks are constituents of an organism, I came to the conclusion that I could center the concept on a heart. A rock heart.
Because I consider the heart to be the organ that touches the balance of a body, the choice was to use one rock among the many types, and make that meteorite resemble this human component. The largest organ, the pump, always active, center of everything.
The cover works simultaneously as a tactile image and a conceptual statement. At its center, a large rock is rendered in high-contrast detail, set against a textured background that recalls fabric or fine paper. This interplay between mineral solidity and soft texture supports the work’s core metaphor, the rock as a living organ, with veins, density, and constant movement. The muted gray palette is punctuated only by a cold, mineral blue, functioning as a visual marker akin to scientific notation or mineral catalogues.
Typography, set in Arial, plays a crucial role. A typeface often associated with utilitarian or corporate contexts is reimagined here as an experimental tool. Text is rotated, set vertically, and fragmented into double square-bracketed sections, creating a coded, archival atmosphere. The presence of binary code extends this semiotic system, positioning the album as an artefact to be decoded rather than passively consumed.
The back cover shifts into a denser, topographical composition. Floating rock fragments recall geological samples, while the tracklist flows organically without rigid alignment. A vertical spine in Arial connects front and back, and right-aligned credits balance the visual weight of the scattered rock forms. The overall effect is closer to a field notebook or research chart than a conventional music back cover.
The identity is conceptually coherent and visually distinctive, merging clinical precision with an intimate, almost diaristic tone. Its main vulnerability lies in legibility at small scales, the fine blue text over textured gray risks disappearing in thumbnails or digital listings. Still, the cover of “Tipos de Rochas & Minerais (Mixtape]” succeeds in transforming the neutrality of Arial into something personal and coded, and in making a single rock beat like the heart of an imagined body.
