Pen & Pixel

Pen & Pixel[1] is a Houston, Texas-based graphics design firm that specializes in musical album covers, especially for gangsta hip hop artists in the Southern US. For a long time it was the house design firm for the famous No Limit Records label.

Pen & Pixel is famous for its identifiable design vernacular of gaudy 3D- and effects-laden text, bracketing heavily layered and amateurish PhotoShop-filtered graphics. These typically overlay a scene depicting the album artist ostentatiously surrounded by women, liquor, gold- and diamond-coated material affects, and other signifiers of a gangster lifestyle.

A Houston Press article tracing the origins of the term bling states,

Chopper City in the Ghetto came out on Bryan "Baby" Williams and Ronald "Slim" Williams Cash Money label, and—as was almost always the case for a Cash Money release in those days—the cover was designed by Houston's own Pen & Pixel Graphics. Even before the word was in common usage, Pen & Pixel's covers defined bling: boxy letters that resembled gold studded with diamonds; tricked-out Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Lexuses; columned plantation-style mansions; platinum dollar signs; and jewelry-draped rappers smirking while talking on cell phones, often with scantily clad hotties looking on lustily. Pen & Pixel's covers created the necessity for a word to describe them, and bling is it. [2]

The firm's artwork came to define the visual style and, to a degree, the artistic direction of a segment of the Dirty South hip hop movement:

"Even the cover artwork of Comin' Out Hard, courtesy of Pen & Pixel Graphics, was influential, as the company would go on to design all of the bling-blinging No Limit and Cash Money albums of the late 1990s."[3]

In one of his Weird Weekends segments ("Gangsta Rap"), British documentarian Louis Theroux is made over by Pen and Pixel as a Mafia Don-style gangsta emcee.

References