Personally I'm not really a fan of just using cropped stock photos, although that's certainly how some of the older honor bars were first made back in the day. Our current process for honor bar creation is actually pretty serious, and we generally go through around 10-20 variants before landing on the perfect one. Cleverly utilizing transparency where we can to add depth, picking unique colours and styles that haven't been used in other honors before, and taking care choosing the margins for where names of various sizes may fit.
I expect you prefer the look of Jimmy007's faction honor bars simply because they're full contrast - something that wouldn't work site-wide on Torn. We found early on we had to dull ours to properly blend them into our UI, they stuck out like a sore thumb, similar to intrusive advertisement banners.
Edit - That's not to take away from what Jimmy007 has done, I think that's a great project and the style works perfectly for his purposes.
Any chance of the text being an actual searchable text overlay rather than part of the generated graphic in future? Would make searching for people in lists so much simpler.
Thank you for reminding me, I've revived this project and hopefully we should have something for next week - fingers crossed.