My favorite part was the response of Phil Libin (our CEO) who questioned that maybe we aren’t the very best mobile app in the whole world. He said this is a challenge to make sure we live up to the award, which I think is a really good way to look at awards in general. In my opinion, it’s actually fairly rare that an award goes to THE best of any given category, so seeing them as a challenge is really the only way to make sure we deserve it.

Again, I’m very happy to be working at Evernote, and proud of the work we are doing. Congrats to everyone!

Portraits of kids are all the same. There may be a lot of them out there, but in the end, they are all just a variation on the same happy theme – a commentary that kids are always smiling and laughing. I think we do them an injustice by painting them this way. This has been more apparent lately as I watch my daughter grow up. She is, undoubtedly happy… and goofy. However, I am more often struck by how serious she can be and how hard it is to make her laugh sometimes. She just looks at me with this quizzical look. Where are all the portraits of kids being serious? Pensive? Contemplative? Or just plain mad?

I was recently in Salt Lake City with a good friend and phtotographer, Michael Friberg and saw some of his recent portraits, all of which were very serious. Epic even.

My daughter was withe me, so we did a quick makeshift lighting setup and started shooting. In about 10 minutes, we captured a full range of emotions, from shocked to laughing, to the aforementioned quizzical.

We didn’t make her do any of these poses. She did them on her own. the exception is my insistence on getting one with a pacifier on her mouth – one that would almost always would be edit out.

I’d love to see what it would look like for other photographers to capture a fuller spectrum of emotion in children.

Here’s a look at just a few of the shots Mike got.

This video from Miguel Endara is all about execution. It documents his 3.2 million dots in this neo-pointillism portrait. I’m not quite sure how (or why) he counted them all, but I’m glad that he did. I guess it’s just one more way for people to document their process, and in this case, process is everything.

He’s been exploring quite a bit of how video can be interactive, and his latest exploration is incredibly beautiful. It’s called Sprawl 2 and it allows you to drag with your mouse or interact with your webcam to affect how the subjects in the video dance. Even if you don’t interact with the video, it’s worth watching all on its own.

As an aside, make sure to check out his Bla Bla video which is, as he describes it, “a film for computer”. He has a knack for developing engrossing experiences that are quirky, dry and totally beautiful so make sure to check out more of his work as well.

My first project after joining the team at Evernote was Clearly, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox to improve your reading experience on the web and your ability to remember what you read. It works by stripping away the excess cruft of any given page and focusing on just the main content.

I worked with a small team and did most of the design for the three themes as well as the minimal user interface and the settings pages. My goal was to keep my design voice as far removed as possible and really let the content speak for itself. From the reviews I’ve been seeing, it looks like that’s exactly what Clearly is good for, which makes me pretty happy.

It’s a really fun and challenging project which we will continue to improve. Give it a try. I hope you enjoy it.

2012 may be the end of the world, so I figured I better start getting my act together. It’s time for a New Year’s resolution. I’m not really into this type of stuff so I figure I’d better make it nice and simple.

There’s a lot of things I want to do this year but there is only one that I’m calling a resolution. I’m going to blog more.

I’ve heard it said that if you are going to make a resolution, it has to be something measurable, so “more” in this case means more than last year. I figure that’s a good low standard, seeing as how last year I posted a whopping eight blog posts (yes, this counts as one – I’m already like 12% there).

I’m going to try doing this by posting more short, paragraph style articles about things I find particularly interesting or creative. That should help get things going a little bit.

So get ready. 2012 is my year for at least 9 blog posts!.

A great way to try your skills and see where you fall short is actually doing it and then looking at where you fall short. Personally, I fell a little shorter than I had wanted. Turns out, these two games bring up some of the hardest aspects of typography.

Looks like they are being produced by method.ac, which isn’t launched yet, but looks to be a peer to peer education site, which, if done right, could be pretty interesting.

Kern Type

Kern Type allows you to… well.. kern some type. It let’s you see the original designer’s idea of the best kerning, but I love the ability to share your own version.

Shape Type

For me, Shape Type is harder than Kern Type. There is a ton of flexibility in how you form the letters and some pretty complicated shapes. It’s a great way to learn about line variation and where the stress of letters should go.

Hope you enjoy these games as much as I do.

If you’ve spent any time in Barcelona at all, you’ve been to La Rambla. I ended up there at least a few times a week for class and always loved this shop.

This type of signage is pretty common around the city, especially in the Borne district, where I stumbled across this beauty.

Amongst the traditional signage, I loved coming across fresh new designs like this – designed by another student at Elisava.

I’m still not sure what to make of this. It is maybe the most messed up looking type around, and yet I find myself completely drawn by it’s quirkiness. If this is a typeface and you know the name of it, please let me know.

That’s it. I guess I’m constantly posting new type pictures as I run across them. Try following me on twitter to stay up to date on my awesome Instagram photos :)

A few days ago, CNN Money was in the office. They just released the article with a little video for those of you who still aren’t really sure what Evernote is all about. The big star here is my appearance two times towards the end of the clip. I was trying really hard to look like I was concentrating :)

See the full article on the CNN Money.