Congrats to Phil Gerbyshak and Christie Crowder for winning the Picnik Premium subscriptions!

I think it was last summer when I first discovered Picnik for adding effects to photos.  My teenage sister was doing all kinds of crazy things to her photos.  Then at Blissdom, I was lucky enough to get a coupon code for a free year subscription to Picnik Premium, giving me more advanced features, fonts, and functionality than the standard edition.  Since then Picnik has become my go-to tool for any graphic design needs I have for my blog and related branding.

With exception of the blog design by See My Designs by Shauna (who ROCKS!), every header I've created has involved utilizing Picnik in some way.

Same goes for buttons for my blog, Buzz Cooperative, and the 15 Days of Marketing series.  I have to admit, I don't use it alone.  And today?  I'm going to share with you step-by-step how to make a header or a button and make it that much more fabulous using Picnik.

Let's talk about a simple button first.

1. I either upload an existing graphic that I have on file into Picnik.  Or, if I just want to take a section of it (perhaps JUST the logo image and not the text, or vice versa) I take a quick screen shot (using Command-Shift-4 on my Mac) of exactly what I want to use.


2. In Picnik, I resize it to the standard button size of 125x125 pixels.


3. Then, I start to have fun.  I play around with adding different effects, stickers, borders, and other embellishments in Picnik until I have my button exactly how I want it.


4. Then I save the image to my computer so I have a .jpg version of it on file.


5. Next, I upload it to my Photobucket account (Picnik actually lets you directly upload to Photobucket from its interface), so that the html for the image is automagically created.

Here's an example of a button I just made using this process:



For a blog header, the steps are a little bit more involved (these instructions have been used for Wordpress and might work on other platforms).

1. First I go into the "Editor" under Appearance in Wordpress and look at the Stylesheet.  This is where I find the width of the theme's header.


2. Then I use Seashore (Windows users can use Paint.net), an open source alternative for PhotoShop for the Mac, to create my canvas setting the width to match that I just found in the style guide.  Usually, you can choose the height and that really depends on personal preference and creative license.


3. In Seashore, I pick the color I'd like to use for the background of the header and use the "fill" tool to make it my color of choice.


4. Then, I go up to File and Export it to a .jpg format and save to my computer.


5. I then go to Picnik, upload the same file and use the Text tool to choose my font and upload any graphics I may want to use, as well.  Picnik let's you drag things around until they're right where you want them.


6. After I am happy with the results I save it to my computer as a .jpg and then upload to Photobucket to translate to html to use in my theme as the header.

Here's a header (remember this one?) I made using Picnik.



Picnik is also great for creating collages with photos, getting rid of red-eye, cropping headshots, and a myriad of other uses.  If I'm dealing with manipulating image, I can almost guarantee you I'm using Picnik Premium.

And guess what?  A friend told the people at Picnik how much I like them and they've given me two 1-year subscriptions for Picnik Premium to give away to my readers!

So here's the deal.  I'm going to give one away to a lucky newsletter subscriber (if you already subscribe, you're already entered!) and one away to one of my feed subscribers (again, if you've already subscribed to my feed, you're already entered).

I will be doing a random drawing from each subscriber list on Monday, May 25 and will contact the winners directly and post their names here.

If you already use Picnik Premium a lot like I do, please let me know any tips or tricks you can share with my readers and me in the comments.

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