Our second Featured Picniker is Vinci Galang, a 24-year-old Filipino living in Makati, one of the cities making up the greater metropolitan area of Manila. He graduated with a degree in computer science, likes video games, anime, art, rock music and Star Wars, and lists his tools of the trade as “Crap Literature and Boring Photography plus Picnik Editing.” His Flickr photostream and Deviant Art gallery are full of portraits which demonstrate a sutble and artful use of Picnik that goes beyond simple photo editing. A perfect candidate, therefore, for our second-ever Featured Picniker!

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Vinci: When I heard and have read that Flickr have partnered with Picnik to give them an editing function. I have been editing since then!

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We’re fast approaching the 232nd anniversary of American Independence and the 141st anniversary of Canadian Federation. So to help celebrate these important dates, we’ve got new Independence Day and Canada Day shapes!

There’s fireworks, noisemakers, maple leaves, flags and bunting and, as always, funny hats.

Our solid gold (not really but it’s heavy enough to be) Stevie Award was delivered today, swathed in black satin. Presented to Jonathan in New York last week and then shipped to us to save his back, it’s now standing next to our 2007 Macworld Editor’s Choice (aka “Eddy”) statue on Jonathan’s filing cabinet. What with the Eddy, being an official honoree of the Webby Award this year, now Stevie, and even being included in TIME magazine’s list of the 50 Best Websites of 2008, we’re really beginning to need a trophy case in here.

Picnik has been included on TIME Magazine’s 2008 picks for the best the Web has to offer: 50 Best Websites 2008! Listed under “Handy Tools”, staff writer Anita Hamilton praises our “elegant simplicity,” and writes:

Picnik
Anyone can snap a photo. The hard part is editing a crappy digital image and turning it into art. Until now, that’s been too complicated for mere mortals. Good thing you don’t need any special skills to use the free photo-editing tools at Picnik.

We’re also mentioned on her podcast, where she says we’re “the best,” to “just go there, you’ll like it,” and mentions our partnership with Flickr. And speaking of our Flickr friends, Anita has included them on TIME’s list of Sites We Can’t Live Without:

Flickr
Digital photo–sharing sites have come and gone, but Flickr has remained. It offers some of the smartest tools for managing your ever expanding picture collection — from Photostream, which lets you scan your pics quickly, to a newly added video tool for pro users (who pay $25 per year). We also dig Flickr’s photo-editing capabilities provided by Picnik.

We want to thank TIME for recognizing us this way, and we want to thank our users for being such great photo-editing rockstars with us. Because you’re all so awesome, we hope you go to our review page and rate us!

While Jonathan pounds the pavement in New York this week, the rest of us have been pressing our noses against the glass in Picnik World Headquarters Conference Room A, spying on the newlyweds moving in next door. A pair of common gulls, they so far have made excellent neighbors, keeping their yard tidy, going on walks together around the roof of the annex next door when Mr Gull gets home with the day’s catch of pizza crusts and candy wrappers, and keeping their squawking to a minimum.

Mrs Gull spends her day quietly sitting on her nest, usually facing south but sometimes turning towards the north to put a little variety into her new life as a housewife. We haven’t gotten a glimpse of the eggs yet, but we’re considering climbing up onto the fire escape for a better look.

Our first Featured Picniker is a nineteen-year-old Canadian student. Katie McDonough came to the attention of Team Picnik late last summer, after we launched on Facebook. The fact that she’s a perfect representation of a Facebook Picniker hadn’t nearly as much to do with it as did the fact that she’s amazingly talented, and was instantly taking the sorts of pictures any other university student has in spades, and using Picnik to create beautiful, lyrical, poetic creations with them.

Because of her talent and because she was using Picnik exactly how some of us dreamed our users would, and because she’s been with us since the beginning of our relationship with Facebook, Katie soon became a sort of icon for us, an archetype for everything a Facebooking Picniker can be, and everything our users can be capable of. So, of course, we had to feature her for our inaugural Featured Picniker post.

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Our intrepid Jonathan set off for the East Coast on Wednesday, and early on his agenda was a little meet-and-greet at the Marriot Marquis Hotel in the heart of Times Square… for the 6th Annual American Business Awards!

The ABAs, or the “Stevies”, were presented in over 40 categories, with over 2,600 submissions from companies of all shapes and sizes, and Team Picnik won *our* Stevie Award for Overall Design. So once again, back pats all ’round!

Team Picnik members have been sitting a little straighter at our desks this week, because we won the 2008 Interactive Media Award! Yes, we’re “Best in Class” in the photography category. Back pats all ’round.

Sifting through our linkage over the weekend, we found some really excellent video tours of Picnik of all the editing tools and more exciting special effects from a Second Life perspective. First, a one-minute quick tour from Torley Linden:

And then a longer, 12-minute tour:

Featured quote from the video: “Makes you feel really good and makes you want to invest in their product!”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves! Thanks, Torley! And on the blog:

I freshly upgraded to a Picnik Premium account. This US$25 investment was a no-brainer, considering how many right things they’ve got going for them. For one, their website design is exemplary, consistently-themed (grass & skies!), and helps you learn more about — and use! — the product without wasting time. From their uncanny ability to make forms simple and even (gasp!) enjoyable to fill out to how clear they communicate Picnik’s benefits, it’s a winner all-’round.

Picnik itself is fantastic: totally integrates with Flickr (altho you can upload images from your hard drive and other sources too), the effects enable you to get stunning results in just a few clicks, and it’s severely smile-inducing.

Emphases his. Thanks, Torley!

Then there’s “Picnik, A photo editor for the rest of us” from Marcie Vargas, who says,

I love Picnik. I can’t put it any simpler than that. Picnik is a photo editing program that works in your browser— PC or Mac. The interface is ridiculously easy to use, the options are fun and plentiful, but most importantly, your picture will look good.

I have long hesitated to really use much photo editing… I don’t want to read a manual or a take a class just to tweak pictures I take as a hobby. Other programs seem too simple for my needs, and the results never quite satisfy me.

That’s just the sort of thing we here at Picnik love to hear. Photo editing should be fun (”play”, even, as Torley calls it). And unless you’re that small percentage of the population who is a very specific type of person needing to do very specific types of things, there’s no reason a photo editor has to be complicated and hard to use, or unable to make everyone’s photos awesome.

Meanwhile, we’re happy to see we weren’t the only ones biking into work last month!

Congratulations to all you graduates out there, be it from university, high school, junior high, elementary school, kindergarten, preschool… And congratulations to all you dads out there who paid for all that fancy education (have you seen the price of finger paints lately?).

To help you all celebrate, grads and children of dads, we’ve got some new Shapes up: mortarboard hats, diplomas, ties, toolboxes, and beer (it’s amazing how many holidays go with beer shapes).

Photo by by CarbonNYC