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.

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.

Blogging about Apple products? The free Tigerpress WordPress theme from Smashing Magazine may be just what you’ve been looking for.

Taking a page from the design of Mac OS 10.4, Tigerpress resembles many of the key characteristics of Apple’s previous operating system. From the use of many true Apple icons (though scaled down in size) to the background and colors used in the theme, Tigerpress is as close of a representation to the true Tiger operating system as we’ve seen to date.

While there are a few other Apple related WordPress themes out there, the flow and overall high amount of polish on the Tigerpress theme really set it apart from the crowd. Using it truly gives you the experience that you are browsing through files and folders using the Finder.

However, I find a couple of things with this release to be very strange. Firstly, does anyone else find it odd that, nearly a year after the release of Leopard, the designers chose to build a Tiger styled WordPress theme? And secondly, are there really that many Mac bloggers out there who could directly benefit from using a theme like this?

Click this link to download it. Or view a preview image of the theme.