Pen & Pixel is a Houston, Texas

Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

-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

No Limit Records

No Limit Records was an American hip-hop record label that was founded in 1990 by hip-hop artist, Percy "Master P" Miller. It was distributed by Priority Records.-No Limit Early years:...

 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,
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:
In one of his Weird Weekends segments ("Gangsta Rap"), British documentarian Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux

Louis Sebastian Theroux is an English broadcaster best known for his Gonzo style journalism on the television series Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends and When Louis Met.... His career started off in journalism and bears influences of notable writers in his family such as his father, Paul Theroux and...

is made over by Pen and Pixel as a Mafia Don-style gangsta emcee.