Last week Brian, our Quixotic Softographer, told his incredibly pregnant wife about our latest additions of Stickers and Fancy Collages, and said that it was therefore safe for her to have their baby, because they were all set up for the announcements.

That’s right, for Picnik Premium members, we have two whole sets of Baby Fancy Collages! One for baby boys, and one for baby girls! Each set has a dozen adorable and tastefully laid out spaces for either single or up to three photographs of your little bundle (or bundles!) of joy. Plus, for the Customization-enthusiasts amongst you, or those who prefer to put together their own adorably-adorned baby photos, there are thirty cute and cuddly baby-themed shapes in the Stickers list.

And, sure enough, on Thursday last week the newest (and by far the smallest and cutest) member of Team Picnik came into the world: little baby Rowan. Congratulations, Brian and family!

Celebrate our little blue planet today with our brand new ecologically awesome Earth Day Stickers!

Besides the leafy branches, earth, and recycling sign you see before you, we’ve got green housing, green energy, green architecture and green transport Stickers to choose from too. So enjoy making your environmentally sustainable, paper-free greetings today, and we all wish everyone a happy and natural Earth Day!

Those of you who use the microblogging sensation Twitter are probably already aware of twitter.com/picnik. From that chirpy perch, first Steve and now a whole flock of us watch every Twitter mentioning “Picnik” go by, and have built up a whole colony of happy Picnik users to follow. Those of you reading this blog post on the blog can see to your right the handy Twitter widget that keeps blog readers abreast of our past 5 tweets. And those of you who are looking at our Twitter page will notice that the most recent Tweet was posted from (be still your beating wings) Picnik!

That’s because the most recent addition to our covey of connections is Twitter! Now when you’ve completed Picniking, say, your photo of finches, you can Save & Share directly to your Twitter feed, while tweeting about it, all inside of Picnik! All this is possible thanks to our new partnership with Twitgoo, a media-sharing service created by Photobucket for posting pictures on Twitter.

But twittering isn’t all that you can do from inside of Picnik! You can also post your perfectly Picniked Profile Picture, or set it as your Twitter background! Happy Twittering!

A lot has happened here at Picnik World Headquarters in the past couple of weeks! You all might think that what with all the awards, the conferences, the talks, the surveys, and a fair number of birthday cakes, we wouldn’t have had time for many releases, but oh we have. The Quixotic Softographer’s been tilting at windmills, the Penguin Handler’s been chasing the little dudes around the data center, Steve’s been drinking the tea as fast as he can, and our Data Stylist’s latest data stylings have us all singing Handel. Meanwhile, the Designers have been putting a grassy sheen on all this output while Charlie’s been churning out the releases on a weekly basis. Here’s a brief tour of some of the stuff we’ve put out in the last little while:

The new Fancy Focus effect makes it look like you spent time and money on setting up expensive lenses to get a perfect shot, with your subject in focus and the rest slightly desaturated and slightly faded. Great for crowd shots, busy backgrounds, and cake.

The new Gritty effect is great for people wanting to look real, unvarnished, tough.


There are new Stickers! We often get Picnikers writing in asking for more butterflies and sports shapes! So here you go, both Butterflies and Sports!

Not to mention, Easter and Spring are free for all during the next couple weeks to help everyone embellish their photos of Easter Egg hunts, soccer games, badminton tournaments, and generally the ability to go outdoors again. Meanwhile, all the other stuff mentioned is for our Premium Members only (upgrade here!).

The sun was out, the app was up and running like a champ, the box office called out to us: it was the perfect day for a little R and R. I should have known better.

Last night you may have noticed a big ugly error page where Picnik should have been and a long list of trouble shooting suggestions that all led back to trouble. I wish I could say, “Well, you know the internet, such a fickle mistress,” or maybe I could have said that our tweet tipped off a gang of underground web 2.0 hackers, or even that the ninja cat sensed our retreat and attacked the servers in our absence. In fact, I’m almost tempted to craft an epic saga of renegade pixels joining forces with mutinous coding to rise up in rebellion and override Picnik, but it’s time to come clean:

I was looking at the wrong page in my calendar.

That’s really all it comes down to. I was looking at the wrong date, so I didn’t hit the renew button for our basic security certificate before grabbing my coat and heading out the door. To all those who suffered in the absence of Picnik, I am sorry. Picnik is back up and I’ll be double checking the dates in my agenda from now on.

Thanks for your patience, everyone!

Hi! I’m Lisa and I’m the newest member of the Picnik team. Part of being new is learning, learning, oh and then some more learning. So I would like your help with my learning curve!

I know what I would love to see us do next but I want to know what you all think. I want to better understand how and why you visit Picnik. What you love and what you would love for us to do. So I (together with some of the magic-makers here at Picnik) have pulled together a quick survey! Everything is confidential but your answers will help guide what we should work on next.

So thanks ahead of time for helping make Picnik even better (and for helping me learn)!

Take the Picnik Survey! And Happy Picnicking!

Monday, March 16 Update: After a week of incredibly overwhelming response, we’re closing the survey and letting ourselves catch up with all your responses and tens of thousands of comments! We’ve already gone through half of them, and we’re going to to read every single one of them! Thank you all again for being so generous with your time, and in such numbers. And now that we know what you all think, we can’t wait to decide what we’re going to do next!

Don’t forget! Picnik is up for a SXSW award and you can vote once a day, every day, through March 15! Just click this link, enter your secret password, and keep voting!

Remember, you can only vote for one company on that list, so choose wisely! Vote Picnik!

Update: Voting has closed! Thanks, everybody, for your support, and wish us luck in Austin this weekend!

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.

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!

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!