In another bid to prove my theory that we’ve got a classy bunch of forum contributors, I bring you Pinstripes by LionHart. In naming alone both the author and the resulting wallpaper ooze class. These are pinstripes that would please the most demanding of client; from a Old Scicilian Mafia Don to a Savile Road tailor. Big Shot to Big Pimpin’. MacThemes reader or writer. Available in the forums or deviantART.

The green revolution is in full swing. Incandescent light bulbs are gone, trash requires quite a few different bins, and, if I could afford it, I’d drive a Prius— but I can’t, so I own a bike. The only remaining obstacle is what to do about these damn environmentally un-friendly hard drive icons. Jonas’ “Summer Drives”, for example, don’t look very biodegradable. I’d sort of resigned myself to maybe buying carbon credits until I came across Box Drive by spiralstairs. His icon is made from 100% recycled material: clean and simple icons that come in 7 different colors.

When modding the Dock in Leopard became possible I was excited at what I imagined were the possibilities. It soon became clear though that there is only so much you can do with so few pixels, and so a myriad of beautiful but not terribly different Leopard docks were released. Most of them are tweaked versions of dark black, metal, or glass dock designs— with a few notable exceptions. Alu Curved 3D is one such exception. Simply put, it surprises; its subtle downward curve gives it a sense of being anchored to the screen instead of floating, something different to hold all those pretty dock icons.

Most art, it could be argued, is fueled by desire; whether it’s for a woman, fame, self expression, or an urge to replace an ugly icon in your Dock. In the case of the latter, you can sometimes just cross your “I’m not an icon designer” fingers and hope that someone else has that desire, and can do something about it. Thank you, MisterJack. Evernote is a fantastic application and if this were a software review site I’d easily rant on about how much I love it; but man, do I dislike its icon. In all its green garishness even the cute elephant symbol annoys me. MisterJack has fixed that, taking the only good thing about the original icon, the elephant, and puts it into a much nicer context: a small 3 ring notebook. Fetch it here.

“If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”
—Free Bird, 1974

This icon is it, man! If I could attach it to my hands or make it my hands I’d be rocking it Lynyrd Skynyrd style! Take me back to 1974, “cause there’s too may places I’ve got to see!” There are icon designers and then there is “Oguz”; no other details are listed in his forum profile, so he could be an it for all I know. But damned if he doesn’t create icons that really have no business being icons. These aren’t icon releases: these are slices of Oguz’s subconscious, like a scene from “Being John Malkovich”, its place with an assortment of crazed eye animals that all look like they’ve had too much Red Bull and then tossed the can into a goat head trash can. It’s a place where hands take flight. Grab the icon, create a blank folder and just let it live on your desktop a while.

I don’t normally bring updates of previous featured icons to the Front Page. Updates, while appreciated, usually amount to some tweaks or refinement of the original work. Summer Drives 2, however, is no mere tweak and Jonas Rask is no mere Gentle Dane/MD/Designer. This release expands the original 5 icons to a full 11 icons that now cover any sort of drive you might use, from a MobileMe iDisk icon to an Air disk. Jonas does this with his usual aplomb, and now, even though I rarely use it, I’m forced to keep my iDisk connected just so I can see his icon on my desktop.

There are people that love nested folder hierarchies: people that find the default Home folders— movies, pictures, music, and documents— useful, and proceed to actually put photos, .txt files, .mp4 files, and such in the corresponding folders. Sadly, I am not one of those people. I have at least 3 different places where misc. photos go on my hard drive. I have some movies in the “Movies” folder but many, many more on external drives, which is why forum member toffeenuts’ latest icon is sort of near and dear to my disorganized heart. The adequately-named “Dropbox:Shovebox” is now the icon for the folder that I euphemistically titled “Stuff”. So grab the icon in the forums, and be grateful for Spotlight.

I like wood: wood desks, wood furniture, a nice solid wooden door, or a hard wood floor. In fact, the only thing I dislike about wood is the whole “kill a tree” bit. So it’s always with some small level of expectation that I open forum threads with wood wallpaper releases. The vast majority, however, fail to capture the one thing I love about wood: its texture and character. They are inevitably perfect, smooth, light-creme wood; the likes of which you’d find on Scandinavian furniture design as opposed to on the floors of an old Brownstone. I’ve said this before, but the forum members are a classy bunch and one of them, MacBaio, has finally released Another Wood Wallpaper that actually looks like I could run my fingers over it and feel the knots.