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.