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.

My friend Marcelo Calbucci is a serial entrepeneur in the truest sense of the word. Not only does he create startups, blog about startups, and go to events for startups, but he loves the startup process so much that he has founded Seattle’s very first annual ‘StartupDay’ (yep, a whole DAY celebrating startup awesomeness). To me, Marcelo himself embodies the ’startup spirit’; always affable, he deals with adversity with resiliency and grace, while handling success with humility. He is quite possibly the hardest working man in show business. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from Thoreau;

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”

Thus, StartupDay 2009 was created to help current PRE-entrepreneurs to get introduced to the notion of startup creation. It will be a full day of talks from some known entrepreneurs in Seattle. Marcelo has graciously asked me to present at StartupDay on Sept 26th. From Marcelo:

If you are a technology person (developer, tester, program manager, general manager) and you want to learn more about startups and how to make them successful this is the conference for you. It doesn’t matter if you are ready to found or join a startup now, or if you just want to learn more to be better prepared once you decide to leave your corporate job.

Sign me up for sure! If you will be in Seattle and want to hear some great thoughts on the startup scene; you can register for Startup Day here: http://www.startupday.com/

On Mondays, we roll into our swanky downtown office after adventurous weekends of backpacking at Greenwater Lakes, cruising the slopes of Crystal Mountain, and riding the fake plastic horses of Pier 57. Tuesdays you’ll catch us wisecracking between meetings, before meetings and after meetings. Wednesdays are jam packed with coffee fueled last minute bug smashing, hot fixes, code correcting, executive team meetings, conference calls galore, oh, and did I mention coffee?

Thursday mornings are the apex of importance for this Seattle startup! In the world of web applications it’s known as a launch day. This is the moment we release any awesome new effects, fonts, frames and stickers along with design changes, new upgrade paths, and all the other back-end maintenance projects we’ve been working on.

By the time Thursday afternoon rolls around, understandably, we are quite tuckered out.  But it’s only day four in the week and we’ve still got one more day to conquer.  How do we do it? What’s our silver bullet? What gets the team through the final hour (4pm to 5pm)? Three words:

Easy. Listening. Thursday.

It’s time for Team Picnik to work in complete and utter smoothness. We dim the lights, we crack open an ice cold Crystal Geyser Juice Squeeze and we get down to business. The business of tranquility, that is.  Saxophones, long wavy hair, circular breathing, and lingering beats.  We pick a starting point (Al Green, Kenny G,  Bolton, or is it more of an Enya day?) and let Pandora do the rest.  This is what soothes us, eases our worries, and keeps us cool in the chaos of web 2.0.  It’s that simple, and for this Easy Listening Thursday and the many more to come, we invite you to do the same.