Pen & Pixel

Pen and Pixel [ [http://penandpixel.com/ Pen and Pixel's website] ] is a Houston, Texas graphics design firm that specializes in musical album covers, especially for Gangster Rap artists in the Southern US. For a long time they were the house design firm for the famous No Limit Records label.

Pen and Pixel are famous for their identifiable design vernacular of 3-D and effects-laden text, bracketing heavily layered and 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 [http://www.houstonpress.com/2004-07-15/music/on-da-lingo/print 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 and Pixel Graphics. Even before the word was in common usage, Pen and 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 and Pixel's covers created the necessity for a word to describe them, and bling is it. [ [http://www.houstonpress.com/2004-07-15/music/on-da-lingo/print "On Da Lingo: Tracing Houston roots in three omnipresent hip-hop terms" by John Nova Lomax, Houston Press 2004] ]

Their artwork came to define the visual style and in part the artistic direction of the Dirty South rap 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 the bling-blinging No Limit and Cash Money albums of the late '90s." [ [http://wm01.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:hnfixq8gld6e All Music Guide review of "Comin' Out Hard"] ]

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