November is Movember, a whole month devoted to supporting and raising awareness for research and issues surrounding prostate cancer and men’s health. Men around the world show their support by starting clean shaven on November 1 and then growing a moustache for the entire month.

Free for the month of Movember, Picnik invites people of all genders to support their Mo Bros by using our new Beards tool to paint on a truly excellent moustache for your Facebook profile pictures, Twitter avatars, blog portraits, family snapshots, and anywhere else you’d like to commit yourself publicly to this worthy cause.

A few months back we launched a Product Ideas page to gather your ideas and insights for Picnik. We received hundreds of ideas and thousands of votes. We were encouraged, humbled and amazed by the ideas and the enthusiasm we saw. We found so many ideas we are already working on which told us we were on the right track; has a few “why didn’t we think of that!” moments; and saw so many incredibly creative ideas.

A few of the suggestions we saw we even have plans to release before the end of year. Some are big enough that they’ll take a bit longer; in classic Picnik style we want to make sure we can provide you features that are not just technically feasible but easy and enjoyable to use.

Whether your idea launches on Picnik or not we loved hearing from you and thank you for sharing your thoughts. Because we loved it so much, we thought we would do it again by tapping into Picnikers’ creativity for ideas around the holiday season. What types of things would you like to see to help celebrate your favorite festive holiday? Submit your ideas or vote on what others have to say. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

Team Picnik has put together four spine-chilling tutorial videos for our new collection of Halloween effects: Making yourself undead in a few clicks; taking your photo from normal to paranormal by layering Halloween textures; adding swashbuckling scruff to someone who needs it with Picnik’s beards, and this tiny ghost’s horror movie debut, below:

Head on over to our help center to see all four tutorial videos, and let us know what you think!

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Picnik would like to make it easy for everyone to support this important cause with our Pink Ribbon Effects and stickers. Try it out on your profile pictures, Twitter avatars, blog images and anywhere else you think it would help increase awareness and education about the issues surrounding breast cancer.

We’ve gone nuts for Old Glory this year with a whole new suite of Effects, Stickers and Fancy Collages for the 4th of July! Cover your photo with twinkling Bokeh Stars, turn it Red, White and Blue, cover it with flags, bunting, and patriotic hats, explode Fireworks all over it, then place your patriotic pièce de résistance, in one of our new collections of Party Mailers and scrapbook-style Fancy Collages!

Speaking of Stickers, today is Canada Day! O Canada, our friendly northern neighbor, we have all the Red and White and Maple Leaf-festooned stickers you could ever want in our seasonal Stickers section. And of course our Text tool is as bilingual as the National Parks! And speaking of French (and speaking French), don’t forget Bastille Day is fast approaching too! Picnik has a fine set of French flags, berets, baguettes and more for you patriotes et patissiers.

We here at Picnik think that fatherhood goes beyond the recliner and lawn mower jokes. We think that raising kids is an adventure, and dads love documenting the escapade with photos: School portraits, family snaps from summer hikes, baby pictures, dads love these things!

So this Father’s Day, give your dad something to really make his cubicle glow with pride: An action-packed tale of paterfamilial derring-do and barbecues with our new Father’s Day Effects and Stickers.

Happy Father’s Day and Happy Picniking!

Whether you play soccer or football, whether you support Australia or South Africa or Italy or Brazil or any of the qualified teams, Picnik has everything you need to drape your allegiance around your neck, paint your face with pride, and surround yourself with the colors of your national squad.

The most popular game in the world, fuessball has long been called “the beautiful game.” It’s gone from its origins as the game of a few English university students to an international organization with 208 national fútbol teams playing for its championship title played every four years. That’s 16 more countries playing calcio than are represented in the United Nations! Of those, just 32 knattspyrna teams will advance to the finals in South Africa this week.

So when the サッカー starts up this week, come to Picnik for everything 축구: scarves, face paint, flags and anything you need for soccer in whatever language.

Happy Picniking from Team Picnik!

Update June 17th

Team Picnik’s own Annie Laurie made this easy tutorial explaining all the new footie features:

It’s the Memorial Day Long Weekend: The ads are all for barbecues, the malls are all having sales and here in Seattle, it’s pouring rain.

As the official opening of summer with the end of school on the horizon, everyone gathers around in the late spring sunshine (or huddles out of the rain, as the case may be) in a relaxed, carefree spirit with friends and family. These days there are many ways to celebrate Memorial Day, and we here at Picnik want to help you celebrate it with memories. So whether you have a photo from your family barbecue, your day at the beach or a loved one serving overseas, we have a whole new section of Memorial Day Stickers including the barbecue, but also the parade, the poppies, and the yellow ribbons. We also have new military-themed Camouflage Frames, in both traditional and digital camo, representing as many kinds of terrain (including pink!) that you might find yourself in.

Have a safe and happy Memorial Day, and Happy Picniking!

Out with the old, in with the new! It’s 2010 already: A whole new year, a whole new decade!

Like most things on the internet, there’s not much about Picnik that can really be thought of as old, exactly. But boy do we have new stuff to ring in the new year! We’ve spent all of 2009 churning out new features and functionality to make Picnik even awesomer with Touch-ups, Show, masses of seasonal effects, new shapes and Stickers, new Effects, even new Team Picnik members! So much new for the New Year!

With all this exciting new stuff, Picnik’s at risk of getting a little big, a little heavy, a little rotund. Nearly doubling the amount of features on a site is bound to have an effect on the waistline, but we mustn’t let the holiday excess stay permanent! So our resolution for the new year is to keep Picnik trim, in shape and moving briskly despite all the updates!

What about all you Picnikers? What would you like to see in Picnik in the new year? Let us know! And in the mean time, all of us at Team Picnik wish all of you a very happy and healthy new year!

Christmas is here! We here at Team Picnik will be taking these couple of days off to relax with friends and family, open presents, and eat ridiculous amounts of ham, turkey, potatoes of all kinds, pies, cakes, cookies with powdered sugar and spice, puddings doused in alcohol and lit on fire… The list goes on. And then on Saturday we’ll be uploading all the pictures we’ve taken alongside the millions of other happy Picnikers ready to relive and share their holiday memories!

It’s so easy to turn those photos into memories with Picnik’s Fancy Collages and we’ve added dozens of new themes and patterns. You can get started right from the Welcome Page! Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas!