Meet “Pen & Pixel: An Anthology (1993-2020)”, a 300-page volume dedicated to Houston’s most legendary graphic design firm, whose 11-year run gave birth to an aesthetic we associate today with some of the most seminal projects in recent music history —Cash Money and No Limit, early Three 6 Mafia, DJ Screw, Lil Wayne, to name a few.
Pen & Pixel’s iconography encapsulates a very specific, highly regional, and peripheral rap vernacular: From Memphis, Tennessee to the entire Southern rap movement, and beyond, the Houston firm developed a ubiquitous visual language out of an ecosystem where the line between amateur and professional was extremely blurred, permeating popular culture in the process.
This CD-sized, 22x22cm anthology, designed by @piet.amor, chronologically retraces the development of perhaps one of the last truly authorial takes on rap’s visual tropes, albeit unknowingly, and how its unhinged visual techniques became so prominent. Aesthetics by instinct.
