Dress Your Cell Phone or Mp3. Golla, Body Glove, Krusell & More. Save Now!
Cell Phone Case
Top Cell Phone Cases Offers. Huge Selection of Cell Phone Cases!
Cell Phone
Cellular Phones of All Makes Up to $250 Cash Back, Free Shipping
Prepaid Cell Phone
Check The Site For Prepaid Cell Phone. Save On Prepaid Cell Phone
Cell Phones
Searching for Cell Phones? Search No Further. We've Found Cell Phones Here!
Pen & Pixel
Pen and Pixel[1] 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 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. [2]
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."[3]
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.
