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.