Saturday, May 2, is National Scrapbooking Day. For you expressive souls who need more than what a drafting table, cutting board, soldering iron, 14 pair of specialty scissors, a compartmented box full of die-cut letters, flowers, leaves, hearts, teddy bears and kittens, glue and buttons can offer, allow us to offer a way to augment your craft: Picnik!

Just about everything on Picnik can be used towards digital scrapbooking greatness. The internet is full of handy free patterns and textures to use as new papers to layer with, and why limit yourself to your box full of die-cut shapes when there’s our huge collection of Stickers? We’ve got tons of fonts to put your memories into words, and for an extra head start there are all our collections of Fancy Collages, organized by theme. There are oodles of things on Picnik that even we haven’t tried yet, and National Scrapbooking Day is a great time for trying something new! And with our easy integrations on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and all sorts of other photo sharing and social networking sites, it can be like attending a scrapbooking party on National Scrapbooking Day, as well!

For inspiration, our own Brenda Anderson, Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, in had a Scrapbooking contest on the Flickr Picnikers group for the month of March, and to help celebrate all the possibilities of this craftiest of holidays, our friends at Blisstree are having a National Scrapbooking Day Giveaway: two free year-long Picnik Premium subscriptions, just for suggesting to her (and us) some clever feature ideas.

The Webware 100 polls close on Thursday so there are just two little days left to register your vote for Picnik as the best Photo & Video site out there! The winners will be announced on the 19th of May, and until then we’re all on the edges of our seats, but in the meantime, take that uncertainty head on and vote Picnik! Then wish us luck!

Our other big contest, the Seattle 2.0 Awards, are closing their polls today, and the winners will be announced next Thursday at the Pacific Science Center in the shadow of the Space Needle. We’ll keep you posted!

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!

Have you noticed? Picnik is up for five awards this month! Four are conveniently located in the same place for easy voting:

• Best Startup: Picnik!
• Best Bootstrapped Startup: Picnik!
• Best Startup CEO: Jonathan Sposato of Picnik!
• Best Startup Product Designer: Peter Roman of Picnik!

And nominated for the best from the Audio & Video category in the Webware 100 Awards: Picnik!

So click those two little links, tick all the boxes that say “Picnik”, and wish us luck!

Two of the bestest startups in Seattle, Picnik and Wetpaint, have teamed up at last, bringing Picnik’s many photo powers into a seamless integration with Wetpaint! Picnik you know about, but in case you don’t know Wetpaint, they’re a wiki hosting and social networking service for regular people to collaborate online to create webpages about whatever interests them, with already over one million free wikis created. Picnik, too, is designed to give regular people photo-editing superpowers through simple but sophisticated editing tools and then save and share with friends, family, and the world, and doesn’t that sound like the point of a really good wiki? Now whenever you add a photo to your educational, lifestyle, or James Bond Wiki, you can click the Edit in Picnik link to add all of Picnik’s awesomeness to your Tudors fan photos, dogs pictures, or Daniel Craig’s DB9!

KrisD, our 13th Featured Picniker, is the second professional photographer using Picnik for her business! She lives in Belmont Heights, in Long Beach, with her husband and four-year-old daughter. She’s always been into the arts, and studied art, landscaping, and architecture at various colleges in Southen California, including Cal Poly Pomona and Santa Barbara City. She’s been drawing and painting since her childhood, but finds that since having her daughter she uses her photography as her canvas and editing tools (and Picnik!) as her media.

This background in fine art has definitely informed her photography, as she considers herself more of a photographic artist than a photographer since her real passion finds its expression in tuning her images with artistic effects, which is readily evident perusing her Flickr photostream. Collage, Cinemascope, Cross Process, and a fair amount of Reala 400 (a preset Curves effect in the Advanced section of Create), each one of her photographs is exquisitely turned out, whether brides, expectant mothers, children, or chihuahuas in shades. And all this using Picnik, and for her business as well! We were all so impressed we just had to pick her for our lucky 13th Featured Picniker.

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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!).

Hot on the heels of our Webware 100 nomination, we’ve already been nominated for not one more award, not two, not even three, but four awards in this year’s Seattle 2.0 Awards!

We’ve been nominated for Best Startup! Because Picnik is one of the most innovative, industry-leading, fun, growing-by-leaps-and-bounds, making-money-in–this-economy, and generally awesome startups out there!

Jonathan’s been nominated for Best Startup CEO! Because of his history of successful serial entrepreneurship which has turned his own successful stint at Microsoft into successful startup experiences for dozens more people including his last company, Phatbits, sold to Google in 2006, and now us lucky Team Picnik members. He’s also polite, savvy, and well-dressed!

And all three of our founding partners together can be congratulated for Picnik being nominated for Best Bootstrapped Startup, because all of Picnik is here and cashflow positive without any outside funding!

And lastly, Peter has been nominated for Best Startup Product Designer! As “The Designer” at Picnik, Peter came on as Employee #1 and designed and implemented Picnik’s entire brand, UI, UX, early marketing endeavors, even a bit of PR and a large amount of product planning and development. He’s unique in his field in his ability to work with and understand the languages of designers, developers, and lolcats, and through his devotion to the product, its millions of users, and the bottom line, without him there would quite literally be no Picnik.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to vote Picnik in the Webware 100 Awards! We’ve got some pretty stiff competition, so we’ll need every one of you wonderful, supportive, vote-happy fans!