— CLIENT
Bebo
— ROLE
Lead Artist
— TEAM
5 Artists, daily collaboration with engineers & product design
— DATE
2013
Brief
Originally launched as “Chatty Heads,” Bebo (rebranded from Hashtag Anything) was a social avatar and chat app aiming to capture a teen-to-young adult audience. As the first art hire, I was responsible for defining the entire visual style, evolving the characters from oversized cartoon heads to more versatile avatars that could express humor, style, and personality.
I built the art team from scratch, trained artists on technical workflows, and collaborated closely with engineers to create scalable SVG pipelines and hashtag integrations. Assets had to be tagged and exported flawlessly, since a single error could break functionality inside the app. The challenge was to create thousands of poses, outfits, and hashtag-triggered scenarios that felt fun, irreverent, and instantly shareable.
Result
⮑ App achieved 500K downloads in the first week after launch.
⮑ Scaled the art system to support daily avatar updates, mini-games, and hashtag-generated content.
⮑ Built and managed an art team of five, unifying output so the characters felt consistent across multiple hands.
⮑ Helped evolve the visual style to appeal to an older teen/young adult demographic, shifting away from “too young” proportions to avatars that could carry more personality and movement.
- ⮑ The app’s core social mechanics later informed Blab, which sold to Twitch.
Early notebook sketches to capture emotion
Video from the Bebo Launch Party
Press
👽 Want to take this to another level? E-mail me!