In December of 2010, Jeremy Bell, a Partner at Teehan+Lax, came back to the office after a briefing from our client, Bell Mobility. Bell had briefed us and their other agencies on the next quarter's objectives. The brief presented the insight that people were increasingly using social media to establish and form their identities online. Our tweets, status updates, and pictures all contribute to presenting ourselves to the people inside our networks. Bell asked their agencies to come up with ideas that could demonstrate this phenomenon.

Back at the office, Jeremy talked to the team about the brief. The idea that our identity is integrated to our social persona was philosophically an interesting one. One of the agencies was kicking around the tagline "I tweet therefore I am".

One of our initial ideas was to create a visualization using the data contained within one's Facebook or Twitter account. Something abstract but compelling. While we brainstormed different approaches, Duncan Porter, an Art Director, showed Jeremy a link to a series of typographic posters. These posters used type to comprise an image.

Credit: TBWA/Chat Day and Steve Yee

Duncan had an idea. "What if we could have you make one of these but with your own image and using your own words?"

What started as a simple concept became a technically ambitious idea for Bell Mobility that - little did we know at the time - would leave us faced with hurdles we had never jumped before. This is the story of how Bell's Social Portrait came to be. Over the course of a bumpy programming ride complete with loops and all, our ambitious idea eventually had users create over 100,000 Social Portraits.

“The things I share on Facebook and Twitter are a reflection of

who I am.”