I.D. Annual Design Review 2008 / Interactive

Best of Category

Picnik

As soon as the group loaded the online photo editor Picnik into a browser, Vinh remarked, “I wish that, rather than commercial sites, there were more entries like this one, sites that are applications. I think that’s where things are going.” His colleagues agreed without hesitation. It was a moment of clarity late in a long day: Here was an entry that truly showed the possibilities of interactive design in 2007 and beyond.

At first, Picnik seems disarmingly simple, with a bubbly navigation, a cheerful grassy header, and zany status messages that read “buttering sandwiches” or “painting sky” as the application loads. That’s on purpose, as part of Picnik’s mission is to make photo editing feel fun and unintimidating.

Start playing with Picnik, though, and it’s quickly apparent how much it can do. It allows you to pull in images from your hard drive (and directly from your webcam, if you have one) and from whichever big online photo warehouse you have an account with, including Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, Webshots, and MySpace. You can also search the web for a particular photo or enter a URL where you know there’s one you want. Once you’re ready to edit, an intuitive toolset lets you perform basic tasks such as cropping, tweaking the exposure, and reducing red-eye in just a couple of clicks, and the advanced settings don’t take much more work. Then you can use the “Create” tab to retouch your image, add effects, or put it in a frame. When you’re done, you can send your picture back to an online photo account, save it to your desktop, email it, or print it. In short, Picnik acts like the Grand Central Station of the online photo world, effectively organizing traffic while providing a vital service. This breezy efficiency was especially impressive to the jurors. “It’s a scalpel, not a Swiss army knife,” Wickens said. “My mother could use it. Seven-year-olds could use it.” But Picnik has lots to offer experts as well. “If you’re familiar with Photoshop, it really cleans up those methods so nicely,” Vinh said. “It’s like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’ve been doing it that way for years and years.’ It’s a completely simple alternative.” For $25 a year, Picnik Premium offers an ad-free environment with more advanced editing tools, a full-screen mode, and (soon) professional font selections. But the site’s free, ad-supported services will more than meet the desires of most digital shutterbugs. “The bottom line is that it covers a need, and it’s accessible,” Pitaru concluded.

Design Picnik (Seattle): Peter Roman, designer; Darrin Massena, CTO; Jonathan Sposato, CEO; Brian Terry and Steve Leroux, Flex developers; Virginia Coldiron, copywriter

Posted in Awards, My Genius, Press |