Pen & Pixel Graphics, Inc was a graphic design company based out of Houston, Texas, founded in 1992 by brothers Aaron and Shawn Brauch. The company quickly established itself as the go-to design house for many a Southern Rap artist looking for someone to create an album cover for them. By the time they closed in 2003, Pen & Pixel had served as the preferred design firm for both Cash Money Records and No Limit Records in the time period when the south was rising to the hip-hop mainstream, giving them a secure place in the history of the genre.
Pen & Pixel are best known for their immediately recognisable Signature Style: Exaggerated depictions of wealth and street life, overly-literal interpretations of any concept their client gave them, and a gaudy use of photoshop which frequently pushed all of those traits into Mind Screw territory. Essentially, Pen & Pixel presented The Theme Park Version of hip-hop, which became incredibly influential as the genre drifted into the Glam Rap era.
Though Pen & Pixel is now defunct, their work still has a strong following among hip-hop fans and artists for their surrealism, and for providing the aesthetic template for a key formative moment in rap music. Their look is frequently parodied and homaged, which was certainly helped by Pen & Pixel's self-awareness; even in their heyday they were happy to do some Parody Assistance for clients who wanted to see how absurd their covers could be.
Pen & Pixel provides examples of:
- Ban on Politics: Overtly political themes were virtually the only thing off-limits to the company.
- Beary Friendly: Their cover
◊ for Big Bear's Doin Thangs, which is among their more infamous cover designs. - Conspicuous Consumption: A major theme of their work is depicting rappers alongside extreme and almost fantastical levels of wealth.
- Droste Image: Black Dave's Next Stop The Ghetto◊ features the artist driving past a burning bus which features the album cover on its side.
- Everything's Sparkly with Jewelry: Any jewellery on a Pen & Pixel cover will have sparkles added to it more often than not.
- GIS Syndrome: And how. The Braunch brothers took many of the photographs they used themselves, but they weren't exactly subtle about how they would go about incorporating those photos into an image.
- Glam Rap: Arguably the Trope Maker. Images of rappers surrounded by mountains of money and Gem-Encrusted luxuries certainly did a lot to help shape the popular image of rappers around the millenium.
- Southern Rap: They were a major player in helping to define the look of southern hip-hop as something unique and distinct from the then-dominant east and west coast regional scenes.
