Good portfolio/gallery themes are surprisingly hard to come by in the WordPress theme world. Sure, there are a few that are downright awesome–but they cost money. In the free arena, finding a site for you to display your (or someone else’s) works of art can be a real drag. If you’re already a web designer, sure, you can just build your own WordPress theme. But if you’re a photographer or a graphic artist, or a t-shirt designer, or something else along those lines, you’re stuck with ready made themes or finding a developer to create one for you for a hefty price.

As far as free themes go, you’re limited just to those which display one massive picture at a time–or something similar.

Now, however, you have a chance to display multiple pictures all at once in true gallery style. Inspired by the countless CSS galleries we see floating through the web, CSSEY is a theme designed for people who: 1. like free themes 2. like minimalist themes 3. want to show off their wares. And that’s it. If you can’t fit yourself into all three of these categories, CSSEY is not the theme for you.

Thanks to Best WordPress Themes for bringing this theme to the limelight.

Every once in a while, a WordPress theme comes along that really blows me away. It doesn’t have to be particularly fancy. Maybe it’s just full featured. Maybe it has some amazing splashes of true genius. Whatever it is, there are some themes that definitely stand out from the pack. Infinity is one of those themes.

Designed to resemble the attractive look of the Vikiworks Studio blog, the Infinity theme is three columns of pure graphic design goodness. I tend to think it goes a little overboard with the “so memorable that you’ll have to change a lot to make your blog unique” head and foot portions, but the core of the theme is solid.

This is definitely a theme that will make your blog stand out–until too many people start using it.

Aside from the glaring problem that the theme is instantly recognizable as a free theme, there are a couple of other issues as well. Lack of widget support. Flickr integration but no Twitter integration. But, for the most part, these are minor flaws that have been corrected in a “spin off” theme called Mashup. It’s not finished yet, but should be soon.

In any event, if you can live with the problems, have the need to customize, and want a very attractive free theme at your fingertips, give Infinity a try.

Thanks to Smashing Magazine for bringing this amazing design to the limelight.

The core of this post is designed for WordPress users–but there are just a couple more steps needed for everyone else.

You’ve heard me mention it before–the pain and suffering that goes into working with Internet Explorer 6. It just doesn’t follow the rules.

While layout problems are a major pain, one of my pet peeves is the lack of transparent PNG support in IE6. That’s what we’re here to talk about today–how to fix these problems in just a few seconds without having to do any code editing yourself.

For months (years), there have been quite a few different solutions out there on how to fix these PNG problems. Most of them revolve around inserting some JavaScript into your site’s head and changing the names of all of your PNG files. Unfortunately, a lot of these workarounds have been limited, unable to deal with outside the box PNGs, such as those which have been tiled or used as backgrounds, or so on and so forth.

With all of these setbacks, one solution has seemed to work the best–the Unit PNG Fix. It’s small, simple, and does the job really well. Certainly better than most. I’m using it on some of my other sites, but not this one–yet.

The only real problem remaining is that you actually have to edit your site’s code to ascertain the benefits of the PNG fix.

But those days are gone.

Thanks to the work of Vincenzo Russo, we now have a plugin (aptly named the WP-UnitPNGfix) that can do exactly what the Unit PNG Fix is capable of doing, without having to edit any code. It’s only for WordPress, but that’s better than nothing.

So, if you’re having trouble making that step to edit your own code, try installing this plugin instead. You’ll thank yourself later.

Sometimes a snazzy RSS icon is all you need to seal the deal when it comes to finding new subscribers. Well, that and good content. But enough about content, that’s for another post. What we’re all here for are the RSS icons. And icons we’ve got.

If you’re having a tough time finding the perfect RSS icon to entice your readers, look no further than this post over at the freshly redesigned Pro Blog Design. They’ve got a monster load of great icons for you to choose from.

Even if these 50 or so aren’t enough for you, check out their other post featuring 60+ RSS icons. Definitely worth checking out.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty tired of the same old web-safe fonts on every site I see. Times here. Arial there. Helvetica thrown in for good measure. And lets not forget favorites like Courier.

If you’re a web designer who is as sick of using the same old worn out fonts in every one of your designs, then maybe its time to try something new.

FLIR, or the FaceLift Image Replacement tool, is a script designed to allow you to stop using images (or Flash) every time you want to add a unique font to your web designs. Through the magic of JavaScript and PHP, FLIR preloads the fonts that you desire, allowing them to appear on your page as if they had been loaded onto your visitor’s hard drive for years.

While it doesn’t work for every font, it does a great job on adding enough variety to a site to make it stand out from the pack. And, since FLIR is a free download, it’s hard to pass up.

Thanks to the Web Resources Depot.

How many times do we have to see internet marketers using the same ebook covers, DVD covers, or CD covers time and time again for their products? Frankly, I’m sick of those used up designs and would kill for someone to come up with a cover that actually looks halfway decent.

Alright, picture this scenario. You’ve created your masterpiece video collection on StumbleUpon, or SEO, or design techniques, guitar playing, finding the lowest prices on movie tickets, or whatever else. With all of that hard work you just put in, selling the collection seems like a surefire money maker. So you put up a website dedicated to selling your product. On that site, another lackluster CD or DVD image that looks just like the one everyone else is using. Is that really how you want your product represented? Looking like everyone else’s? I didn’t think so.

So what’s a marketer to do? You could create your own new image. But you don’t have any design skills. Or you could try out these completely impressive DVD and CD cases by Manicho and LeMarquis. They’re all ready to go, so long as you have access to Photoshop or another program that can read PSD files. Check them out below.

Thanks to WebAppers.

A couple of new fonts today. Although you can’t use these for any of your web designs (unless you make an image with the font and incorporate it that way), these are still some snazzy designs that you may never know when they’ll come in handy.

Sometime back, I first heard of the Fertigo font, the precursor to the new Fertigo Pro. It was attractive, I downloaded it, and I used it a few times. Great font, just got stuck on using the traditional designs like Helvetica, Times, etc. Now, however, there is more reason to download Fertigo pro than ever before. The new font includes everything found in the original along with new glyphs for other languages and a number of very attractive dingbats that could definitely be incorporated into a design here and there.

The other font, FF Nuvo, has its roots in simplicity with a bit of pizzaz thrown in for good measure. Several of the letters really make this font stand out. It’s not too overstated in that you could never use this twice in the same project–but its not too subtle either. A nice mix, to be sure.

Thanks go to Smashing Magazine for bringing these two fonts to light.