In the late ’90s and early ’00s, it was damn near impossible to avoid mixtape and album covers coming from the South. The album art was dripping in jewels, and in terms of design, there were essentially no rules.
This aesthetic had folks doing double-takes in the record stores and eventually stirred interest in the music. However, none of this would have been possible without the Pen & Pixel design team.
Founded in Houston by Shawn Brauch, Pen & Pixel served as the go-to company for album artwork during the reign of the South in the late ’90s and early ’00s. The team would go on to produce album artwork in the thousands—and raked in even more in the duckets—for the likes of Master P, Ghetto Boys, No Limit, Cash Money and more.
In a new video with Noisey. Brauch goes through the company’s ups and downs, telling some pretty interesting stories along the way. He speaks on coming up with the term “bling bling” while on a call working out designs with Birdman, getting artists out of TSA after they’d been detained with suitcases of cash, and the fatal blow that September 11 ultimately dealt to his company.
Pen & Pixel was actually one of the first graphic companies to visualize the “Bling-Bling” phenomenon.
“The bling-bling actually happened over the phone,” said Brauch. “It happened between B.G.and myself…He was getting frustrated, trying to explain how we wanted the stuff to shine. He was like ‘this little things’. I used to call it star blast, and I was like ‘this bling’. He was like ‘Yeah ! Bling-bling!’ He said it, I said it. He never thought it would take off anywhere. And he's like ‘Yeah, do the bling-bling thing man, hook it up, nahmsayin' ?’ I was like ‘Alright, alright, I got the handle!’ From there, every single time we put the diamonds and the starblast, it was considered "bling-bling" and that just became a huge term.”
