Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, has handily put together a short video tutorial on Layering (now in Premium Preview):

As seen in the video, Layering is done through the Photo Basket which can be found at the bottom of your Picnik window while in the Edit or Create tabs.

The month of October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Breast Cancer Awareness has been the theme of this month’s Flickr Picnikers Contest! And the winner of the prestigious and coveted 1-year Picnik Premium subscription has been:

jennad4586

The two runners up, and winners of 3-month Picnik Premium subscriptions: kibishipug and C V.D P.

16-year-old Chase Barrington, our eighth Featured Picniker, dwells in Kansas but keeps her heart is in Texas. Her three passions in life are singing, writing, and photography, and she plans on returning to Texas to study digital art in college. Using her writing and music as an inspiration for her photos and vice versa, being home-schooled and possessing a strong faith has given her extra time, and devotion, to focus on her art.

Three years ago she got her digital SLR for Christmas when her parents noticed her constant use of the family point-and-shoot, and a year ago she started uploading photos to Flickr. With a photostream of an unusual level of polish, Chase’s photos are all exquisitely colored (or black and white), carefully posed, and all have some sort of poetic, meaningful title or caption attached to them.

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We were thrilled to hear last night that we’ve taken first place in the graphics category of the first annual Industry Standard Innovation 100 Awards! Along with such winners as Hulu, Mint, Kongregate, and Etsy, winning the TIS 100 award means we were nominated and then voted for by the community: readers, users, founders and executives from across the technology industry, and we’d like to thank all of you!

And today we heard we also won a silver medal in the W3 Award for the “Best Structure and Navigation for a Web Site”! Awesome.

And although it’s not an award as such (that is, it won’t be adding to the hardware on Jonathan’s filing cabinet), we’re thrilled to see Picnik included in Smashing Magazine’s list of Creative User Interfaces in Modern Web Design, “observing the finer aspects of creative and appealing user interface design”, and says:

From the smooth registration form (observe how password and email confirmation fields are hidden until you need them, reducing the perception of complexity) to the actual “in-the-basket” look and feel of this Flash application, Picnik is a joy to use inside and out.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then 30 (at last count) Picniked versions of the same picture is worth at least a 600-page Dickens novel.

This has been a topic over at the Flickr Picnikers group, and they’ve come up with such amazing renditions of the same original photograph from meghuff that we had to point it out.

We’re fans of obscure American holidays here at Picnik, and to celebrate National Boss Day, we designated it Dress Like Jonathan Day!

The most consistently best-dressed guy in Seattle, Jonathan is a regular subscriber to sweaters, corduroy pants, bespoke sports coats and, always, no socks. Next time, we’re thinking of relaxing with Dress Like Mike Day (tee-shirt, jeans) or embrace the outdoors with Dress Like Darrin Day (Columbia Sportswear, REI), but sometimes it’s nice to (by Pacific Northwest standards) dress up a little.

It’s that time of year again… Picnik has gone spooky! All of last year’s crowd-pleasers are back, with some great new additions.

Shapes! Add everything from jack-o-lanterns to ghosts to witches, or even disguise yourself with our forty limited edition Halloween shapes (that’s over twice as many as last year!).

Fonts! we’ve got eight of the spookiest, creepiest fonts around. Now you, too, can spell your name in skeletons.

Effects! Feeling a bit animated? Get reanimated with Zombify, then add a little color to that ghoulish face with Blood Stains.

Meanwhile, we’re afraid that Jonathan has begun staring hungrily at Darrin’s neck again (although he says it’s because he skipped lunch), Darrin keeps having to excuse himself to shave again (at least he’s not blaming it on his cats this time), and Mike keeps saying he’s going to the gym, but why the mumbling about brains?

We’ve got some other goodies to unveil as well! First up, a completely redesigned Welcome Page! Featuring tours, featured features, featured Picnikers, news from the blog and much more. Next up: Awesomer painting! Now when users select the brush tool in many of our Effects, they’ll see it’s vastly improved (and much faster) with new Brush Hardness and Brush Strength sliders! This is just the beginning of lots of shiny newness and improvedness we’ve got in the works.

Happy Halloween from Team Picnik!

Help raise awareness during Breast Cancer Awareness Month with Picnik’s Go Pink! and Frame it Pink! All of October is dedicated to increasing awareness and public discourse about issues surrounding Breast Cancer, which is why we’ve added the new Effects and an expanded section of Pink Shapes.

Looking for a good place to start? Our friends at Flickr have announced a new group to raise money for Breast Cancer awareness and research. For every pink pic added to the group, their parent company Yahoo! will donate one Euro to Breast Cancer charities across Europe! So send your pink pic to Pink 2008!

And this month’s Flickr Picniker Award Theme is Go Pink, so don’t forget to enter your Pink productions to win a whole year of Picnik Premium (now with added Pinkness)!

Collage is officially out and about! Our absolutely-the-most-requested-feature ever, Collage has been in Premium Preview since the end of August and as a quick Flickr search will tell you, it’s been very well-received and has become even better with your feedback!

And now that the Premium Preview Period has ended and Collage is now available to all our users, we’ve added even more Collage Goodness with improved patterns and more more fancy-pants layouts!