We’d like to direct our users’ attention to the new blog the haystack needle, started just this month by our friend Jen Jafarzadeh.

Jen was always incredibly kind to us during her time as editor at Redbook, and never had anything but glowing things to say about Picnik. Now we have reason to return the favor since her new blog is so delightful! She writes about green living, home design, crafts, shopping, and of course the internet’s best photo-editors! In fact, she uses Picnik to edit all the photos on the haystack needle, and the photos on the site are truly delicious. It could be the excellent quality of dishes, stationery, food and furniture that she discovers for us, but we think it’s also that extra Picniky goodness.

And in an era when Domino has been shuttered, House and Garden is long gone, Blueprint, Home, Cottage Living, O at Home and Vogue Living have closed and Country Home will be with us only through March, the future is obviously going to be daily lifestyle blogs like the haystack needle and her friends at Ruby Press, Wiley Valentine, Linda & Harriet, yoga deals, Chelsea Heather, and inchmark. The new trend is casual style, casual elegance, casual lifestyles, even casual magazine publishing! And key to all that is casual online photo-editing!

It’s that time of year again, simultaneously the beginning of the guacamole season and the official end of the holidays: the Sunday when all Americans gather together for buffalo wings, nachos, and FedEx ads.

The championship game of the sport Americans peculiarly refer to as “football” (when in reality it’s closer to rugby), about a hundred million people watch the “Big Game” every year, which even if it isn’t as many visits Picnik gets in a year, is still a lot of gridiron fans. So as a service to all you hundred million devotees of the game, we have a brand new collection of Shapes for you to adorn your Sunday parties with: helmets, jerseys and, of course beer.

We would also like to announce the other big release today for Premium Picnikers: Gritty! Sort of like Orton-ish’s worst enemy, Gritty is designed to make you look real, tough, legit, right there, stepped up, and not taking nuthin from nobody. Like, don’t mess with me, I’m Gritty.

CJ Wheeler loves horses, but her relationship with them has not always been a happy one. When she was thirteen, she fell from her spooked horse and fractured her skull. She missed a whole year of school to recover from the injuries and couldn’t bring herself to go near a horse for 30 years. But then, with a successful career in radio as the Executive Producer for the Rick Roberts Show in San Diego, she and her husband bought a ranch, complete with empty horse stalls, and she decided it was finally time to overcome her fear of horses. Now along with their cat and two dogs, they have three horses: Tango, Cash and Sasha.

Now using photography to make up for those 30 years without horses in her life, CJ got a new camera for her birthday last year and scoured the internet for a photo editor to use when she found Picnik. And it’s because of Picnik that she’s now started a photography business. Writing in to us only this October to ask how we choose our Featured Picnikers, our Feedbackers introduced her to Flickr, where the success of the striking and dramatic Picniked pictures of her animals inspired her to sell her photos professionally. In just that short amount of time, CJ has already been published in two magazines, will soon be a featured artist at a local Wine and Art festival and sells prints through several local stores. Such an impressive and uplifting story surely needs to be told for our eleventh Featured Picniker!

(more…)

There’s an exciting new Effect just released for Premium Picnikers: Dots and Dots! Actually more like 8 features, Dots and Dots include Impressionist Dots, Light Peg Dots, Color Spots Dots, Circle Dreams Dots, Newsprint Dots, CMY Halftone Dots, Jumbotron Dots, and Scoreboard Dots. Also, each one has the full range of Advanced blend Modes and each can be painted in (and out!) of your photo!

Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, has announced the winners of December’s Flickr Picnikers Contest, “Holidays Around the World”. Crystaldbeck’s wintery shot of Chicago wins her a full year of Picnik Premium, while the two runners up, Abbeylovesyou’s Disneyland and Bulmachica’s Statue of Liberty score them both free 3-month subscriptions each!

Windy City by crystaldbeck

(more…)

We’re seeing pink here at Picnik! A hand-picked collection of Valentine’s Day Shapes, Stamps, Kisses and Candy is up! Plus two sets of over 20 brand new Valentines Day Fancy Collages! Now, we appreciate getting a Snoopy Valentine from a box of 36 as much as the next person, but go beyond grade 3 with Picnik’s power of personalization! Plus, they go great with a box of chocolates!

A year ago, Picnik had a little over a million monthly visits. Last week, we had one million visits in one day. Exceeding all our wildest expectations, our 1400% increase in traffic this year translates to 25% more happy Picnikers each and every month!

Since this time last year, we launched the Free side of Picnik with our ad-supported features, professional printing services through our partners at Qoop, professional fonts from FontShop, added the Picnik Basket with the Layering, multi-file uploading, and collage capabilities, Collages and Fancy Collage, a whole slew of fabulously popular touch-up tools like Shine-Be-Gone and Eye Color, the Sandbox tab’s Pixelbender effects, launched with Adobe Flash 10, teamed up with new API partners like Myspace, SmugMug and Photobox, integrated Paypal into our payment options, plus new Effects like Panography, Puzzle, and Advanced Editing tools like Curves, Levels, and the Clone tool.

But it wasn’t just a lot of traffic and releases! The year was happily punctuated with awards and award shows and press mentions and publications! In June we won the Stevie Award and Webby Award, and were listed as one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2008 and Facebook for Dummies‘ 10 greatest Facebook apps. In July we were mentioned in Macworld and were International Design Magazine’s 54th Annual Design Review “Best In Show” for the Interactive category! In August we were an OMMA Awards Finalist, September brought the 2008 Web Marketing Association’s Web Award, October the TIS 100 and W3 Silver Award, and November the Pixel Award for the Geek Category.

Not too shabby!

Big news here at Picnik World HQ, where on Friday, our crack team of server specialists sat holed up in their Top Secret Server Lair high above the rooftops of downtown Seattle, their thumbs a mere blur on the Official Picnik Tally Counter, as on January 2, for the first time ever, we had one million visits in one day!

Happy New Year, Picnikers! Now that it’s about 2pm on the Pacific Coast, most of you should have recovered from last night’s revelries and be ready to start Picniking all those photos you took. Well, let us help make even the tamest soirée look like your own private Times Square (even if Ryan Seacrest couldn’t make it) with our new New Years shapes!