Smashing Magazine has, once again, raised the bar on free WordPress themes with their newest release, Notepad Chaos. Personally, I’m not too fond of the theme. A bit too chaotic, too colorful, and too busy for my tastes–but I’m sure there are some of you who will find much joy in installing this theme. Design choices aside, what does this theme offer that goes above and beyond the competition?

Come to think of it, never mind. The theme is all about the design, and theme-ographer Evan Eckard makes that perfectly clear with massive, lush backgrounds and wild handwritten notes strewn about the page.

While Notepad Chaos isn’t breaking any new ground in a technical sense, it does wonders for those with a keen eye for design.

A few days ago, I posted about six sites you can use to help you find images for your blog posts in just a few seconds. But what if using photos from Flickr isn’t really your thing? What if you want to use a snazzy icon or two to go along with your text? A Flickr search engine certainly isn’t going to help you there.

That’s why I’m showing you some of the best icon search engines on the internet. Whether you like to include icons with your blog posts or you’re just looking for a little something to spice up your desktop, these web apps should be right up your alley. Check them out, see if they offer what you want, and move on down the list if they don’t. And, in case you’re wondering, they’re in no particular order.

[For each site, I looked up two icons, one for Safari and another of a Dog. Some could find an image for both, some could only find one, and others couldn't find any--but your mileage may vary.]

1. Iconlook On first glance, Iconlook seems to be the most professional of the icon search engines. Glossy logo, big search field, it’s a regular web 2.0 site. Even when you search, you have plenty of options to check. Do you want big icons, small icons, or something in between?

However, Iconlook only found one icon for Safari (and it looked amazingly similar to the default icon) and only one icon for a Dog. Both were usable, but for a site that looks so promising, I would have expected more.

If you’re willing to browse, though, Iconlook gives you the option to check out all of the popular icons in a handy grid.

2. Iconfinder Iconfinder’s appearance is surprisingly similar to that of Iconlook. Big logo, big search field, grid layout for found icons. However, it lacks the selection feature to choose a particular icon size you need and it is missing a page filled with popular icons.

Also, searching for both Safari and Dog rendered nothing. In their defense, though, searches for more general topics like Drive, Computer, or Internet all came back with a fairly large number of results.

3. Iconlet Iconlet strays from the gaudy, glossy look of the previous two sites and goes for a more minimalist approach. While this is all well and good, their search feature can be annoying when you find multiple sizes for a particular icon–each size gets its own listing instead of simply combining multiple sizes and showing the largest. Not particularly user friendly.

Iconlet’s database is rather large, however, as a single search returns a number of results in multiple sizes. All icons are free, open source, or creative commons licensed. But, it wasn’t able to find a Safari icon–though it did find a couple of Dog icons.

4. SearchIcon SearchIcon is supposedly listing over 60,000 icons as of this writing, and I can totally believe it. The search engine feels stronger and more robust than some of the other contenders, and it really shows with the quality of results it returns.

SearchIcon also includes a handy feature that I’d like to see all of the other search engines incorporate. A path button which takes you to a page filled with related icons from the same series.

Searching for Safari came up with quite a few attractive results while the search for Dog churned out a handful of others (though no true picture of a dog).

5. Icons Search To be honest, I wasn’t too fond of the way Icons Search looked before I entered any search terms. It seems almost amateurish–but then again, so does Google.

The search feature itself, however, is fast and accurate, coming up with quite a few results for both Safari and Dog. Icons Search is also the only site thus far that 256×256 size icons. Really the only drawback here is the way the icons are displayed after a search. Much like Iconlet, there are multiple pictures of each icon depending on what sizes they come in.

6. The Icon Browser The Icon Browser is easily the most hastily put together of all of the icon search engines we’ve seen. It resembles an early web app from a decade or so ago. In a lot of cases, appearance can be deceiving–but that’s not entirely true here.

The search for Safari returned nothing while the search for Dog returned quite a few results, all of which were low quality, pixelated GIF files that look like clipart from the days of the Windows 3.1.

7. deviantART Last, but certainly not least, we have DeviantArt. Yes, I know it’s not a true icon search engine, though they do have a massive supply of amazing artwork that really blows the rest of the sites out of the water. Just type what icon you’re looking for then click on Customization followed by Icons on the left side of your screen.

Obviously, given the huge amount of art hosted on DeviantArt, finding a Safari icon and a Dog icon was a piece of cake.

So which of these search engines was the best? Search Icon is the clear winner as it totally outshines the rest of the true icon search engines. However, if you really want the highest quality content, you’re going to have to pay DeviantArt a visit.

Alright, so these icons aren’t exactly new, but they are free and attractive–and therefore worth a download. Right? Good.

If you need some sexy little icons for your site and you don’t want to blast your readers with over the top colors and wild designs, these are the icons for you. Simple, grey, and understated. They’re completely free and come in GIF format–so no browser issues to keep you down.

Go pick them up here.

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.

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.