You may have noticed that we’ve gone whole hog over Halloween here at Picnik this month! We’ve got a whole new section of new Effects, Stickers and Touch-Ups, plus fonts in skeletons, ghosts, and other creepy Text, for maximum spookiness.

But we didn’t stop there! In the Library tab we’ve got a whole other line of Halloween content for you: Halloween Fancy Collages!

Halloween is obviously a holiday we love here at Picnik World Headquarters. Maybe it’s because it was the first holiday after our launch two years ago and the first occasion for any seasonal content, or maybe it’s because we’ve all been transformed into werewolves, zombies, vampires and other manifestations of the undead. Whichever it is, we always have a lot of fun at this time of year and, with a little help from Picnik, we hope you do too!

Don’t forget the whole section of new features we’ve devoted to Halloween this year:

Vampire yourself! We’ve got the tools to let your eyes reflect your thirst, put a blood-gorged bloom in your cheeks, get vampiric film star good looks and a bloody tinge to your shiny new canines.

Get re-animated! Detect the delectable dead with Ghoul Eye, Zombify 2.0 (now with added rotting!) and the most hideous wounds we could find.

Haunt your friends and family! Manifest yourself to the living with Ghostify, make your photos the future with Crystal Ball, add a shaft of lightning to your dark and stormy nights and add the ghosts that only you can commune with to your sinister shots.

Plus! Give yourself ogre good looks, stain yourself with blood, add some scary shapes and props and express the pain of the undead with our most fearful fonts. It’s all so easy.

All these Halloween effects – and more! – can be found in the special Halloween section under the Create tab!

It’s that spooky time of year again at Picnik World Headquarters!

We’ve grown a lot as a company since last October and I’m afraid our capacity for mischief has grown as well. For instance, for the past two years at this time, Mike suddenly looks a bit off and starts mumbling about “braaaaaains“, Darrin seems furrier than normal and Jonathan keeps staring at Darrin’s neck. This year, since moving into new, larger offices, it’s a bit harder keeping track of where everyone is, but we would swear that some people are missing.

It all started at the beginning of the month. Mike called all the engineers into the conference room for a meeting. They were in there for hours and when they came out all looked a bit… pale. At first we didn’t notice, since they tend to sit silently at their computers anyway, rhythmically typing, typing, typing. Then we noticed none of them had headphones on. And they weren’t looking at their monitors at all, but staring really quite strangely at the backs of the designers’ heads.

Then the designers. No one noticed anything wrong with them, either. Sure, they came to work wearing black, with dark circles under their eyes, staring moodily and prone to dark corners, but what designer isn’t? It’s the coffin we noticed under Michael’s desk that made us wonder. It seems to have begun with that week Jonathan took them out to lunch, one by one. He took Kelcey out first, so why did she come back with two pricks in her neck? And the next day Michael came back from his lunch with Jonathan with a strange, thick, red fluid in his travel mug.

That’s when people began to disappear.

All this mysteriousness seems to have affected our work, hence the size of this week’s Halloween release. You can’t miss it under the Create tab, with four new scary sections! We’re really excited about all the creepy new features, and hope you all enjoy – or fear – them too.

(And where is Darrin in all this? He’s been pacing the length of his office, all alone, howling at the full moon.)

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we’ve brought back some great Effects and Stickers to help you take part and support the cause.

Add the Go Pink! and Frame it Pink Effects or add a pink ribbon Sticker to the photos you share.  Make your voice heard by tweeting your Pink-ified photos, showing them off on Facebook, emailing them out to friends, or adding them to the Picnikers group on Flickr.

Join us in spreading the word about early detection, prevention, and a cure.

Over the weekend Team Picnik gathered for the Second Annual Picnik Picnic!  We dusted off our boots and climbed into our flannels to rally up at Remlinger Farms in Carnation Washington.

Jonathan presented each member of the team with a customized award for excellence, such as Most Caffeinated without Coffee and Most Likely to Wear a Shirt Designed for a Kid.  After a farm fresh feast of hot dogs, hamburgers and pizza, we were ready to hit the rides!  We partook in everything the farm had to offer from the 4-H barnyard to the not-so-haunted house.  We cruised the Mine Coaster, held in our lunches on the Spinning Barrels and rode the rails in a mini steam train which toted us around the entire farm.

After a sweet (and salty) interlude involving kettle corn we were onto the hayride, pumpkin patch and corn maze!  Before we knew it, the sun was setting, the air was becoming crisp and the map of the maze was failing us.  With the kettle corn sustaining our bellies and the onset of darkness keeping us in motion, we chugged on.  And on.  Eventually stumbling upon a way out and back to the warmth of our homes, where we slept like babies.

It really was the perfect day for a picnic.

Our resident penguin handler, Justin Huff, has returned to Picnik Headquarters from the Washington State Convention & Trade Center after captivating the attendees of IT Roadmap Seattle earlier this week.

Justin educated the crowd on the woes, wonders, and juggling act that comes with Picnik’s high demand for storage capacity and computing power. Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 services combined with patience and Zen make the perfect, cost-effective combination that we require to meet the needs of our users.

Justin also acted as Whippersnapper Ambassador to the IT Nation. On a panel entitled, “Generation Transformation – How Younger Hires are Drastically Changing Business and IT Paradigms,” Justin offered a unique perspective as the sole panel member born in the 80s. And, yes, Justin was the only panelist sporting jeans.

As Summer fades into Fall and inevitably into Winter, we can help you hold onto those careless days in the sun. Pluck a few of our new Premium photo-realistic daisy Stickers and place them into any garden, vase, or flower press image.

No matter how rainy, windy, or snowy it is outside, you’re invited to relax on our evergreen grass fields and place a delicate yellow blossom behind your ear or craft a daisy chain as a crown. In sixteen lovely shades of yellow, white, and red, these resizable petal plants will add a soft accent to any photo in need of a little bloom.

Go Premium and enjoy daisies year-round!

The savviest of the online scrapper artists have already discovered the secret to easy, online scrapbook success: Fancy Collages! Whether you’ve celebrated National Scrapbooking Day with us in the past or you never even knew we had these crafty frames, we have some news for you.

Junior Designer, Kelcey, spent a week furiously cutting with her digital wobble-border scissors, punching virtual holes with her cyber grommet set, and pasting together two-dimensional ribbons, sequins, and beads. The fruits of her labors are twenty (yes twenty!) new Birthday Fancy Collages for Picnik Premium members!

Raise your hand if you have a birthday. So, that’s everyone then?

We owe a big thanks to our material supplier, Plain Digital Wrapper! They enjoy a cozy corner of the online scrapbooking world where their designers compile themed kits full of digital elements (backgrounds, ribbons, confetti, paper cakes, etc.) which our designers then turn into Fancy Collages. The people of Plain Digital Wrapper have been supplying us with the beautiful treasures that we use to create crafty frames for your fabulous photos, so enjoy!

Go Premium and see the new Birthday Fancy Collages now!

Although the resemblance is quite uncanny, you’re looking at the charming and dapper professionals of Team Picnik and not the stars of AMC’s hit television series Mad Men.

It’s true, we here at Picnik like to push the boundaries when it comes to fashion. On most days you will find us dressed to the nines in the highest of quality bleu de Gênes, or jeans, if you will. We’re known for dazzling the greater Seattle area with our denim in various shades of blue: cobalt, navy, indigo and royal!

But on Friday we raised the classy bar to a significant new height. Consider this the startup fashion statement of the year! In the name of prevailing taste, the Season 3 premier of Mad Men and maintaining the utmost  levels of awesomeness, we dressed the part of 1960’s office workers pounding on typewriters and puffing on (in our case, fake) cigarettes.

Jr. Designer, Kelcey, won our in house contest for Best Dressed lady in a sublimely vintage, Peggy Olsonesque dress and jacket. Developer extraordinaire, Alastair, took it home for the Best Dressed gent with a sleek, black cardigan and thick rimmed, lens-less glasses.

We’ve since given up the demanding world of fame and fashion (autograph signing can be such a drag) retiring to the familiarity of jean and jersey. So until someone invents the time machine, these old charmers will be stuck in the threads of a post-millennial landscape.

Hey Picnikers! I’m Andrew, the Summer intern here. I’m nuts about technology, coffee, and being in Seattle. I moved here about 2 years ago from Hawaii to finish college at University of Washington, and grab a degree in Informatics. It’s a very nerdy field that seeks to improve how people use computers, and develop information systems that make our lives easier, happier, and more productive. Keep an eye out for my senior project, I’ll be creating an education system to revolutionize how we learn and study.

At Picnik, I’m learning about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It’s a component of web development that ensures the site’s code and content appeals to search engines so that our site ranks well for the keywords we want. In English, it means that if you search for “photo editing” on Google, we should be at the top of the list.  It’s like playing a game – devising strategy and making moves as I gain some ground or learn from mistakes. I also get to explore how Picnik can participate in social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, and the rest, to build good online relationships with our users and friends.

Life here rocks. Every day, as I get on the bus, I think “I work at a web 2.0 startup in downtown Seattle.” and it really puts a smile on my face. At 9:30ish we line up for the coffee train to Café D’arte, where they craft awesome latte art to fuel our day. After developing sweet ideas all morning, we wander down to Pike Place for lunch. We pound out another set of genius in the afternoon, maybe take another coffee break, then go home and rest for another day. I have always been interested in business, and admittedly a gigantic computer nerd, and I’m really happy to be in a place where I experience the best of both.