Notepad Chaos: A Free WordPress Theme
Over the last years we’ve featured a number of designers and developers who released their work for free — among other things we presented high-quality free fonts, free WordPress themes, free wallpapers and, of course, free icons. You can find many of them in our section Freebies.
Every release helps to make the Web a nicer place which is why we support designers and challenge them to release something for free in order to be featured on Smashing Magazine. And the results are quite often pretty impressive.
Today we are glad to release Notepad Chaos — a free professional WordPress-theme. The theme has 2 columns, a quite vibrant design including “personal” design elements such as handwritten headings, stick-it-notes, clips and pins. The theme was designed by Evan Eckard especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.
Download the theme for free!
You can use the theme for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission — please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you are planning to release your modification, please ask our permission first.
- Preview (0.4 Mb)
- Download the theme (.zip-package, 0.5 Mb)
- Download PSD-sources (.zip-package, 5 Mb)
- Notepad Chaos 2.0: Official Release and Download page
The theme has been updated to version 1.5. It’s now up-to-date with cleaner code and includes a lot more functionality (gravatars, dynamic sidebars, etc.). You can find the files and demo here.
Motivation behind the design
Here are some insights about the design process and development from the designer himself.
“I had recently stumbled upon many websites with gorgeous, gigantic, illustrated backgrounds and wanted to try my hand at creating a site that shared that similar element. This theme was an experiment into layering multiple images and having everything line up and flow with the site’s content.
Among other things, the Notepad Chaos theme has handwritten search box and navigation at the top of the layout.
It was quite a challenge to develop the design after creating it, but in the end it helped me gain more experience in CSS and what we designers can do to try and create sites with plenty of visual depth. On the technical side of things, the theme doesn’t use any plugins or extras, and focuses simply on the design.
Sidebar in the Notepad Chaos is designed as a post-it-note and clipped at the top.
The themes uses a custom field called “thumbnail” where the user can add an image to their post. The instructions are within the readme file along with how to set up the menu links.”
Thank you, Evan. We appreciate your work and your good intentions.
Last but not least…
We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists. You may not know it yet, but we might feature you in one of our upcoming posts.
If you would like to release a high-quality free font, a WordPress-theme, some wallpapers or an icon-set please contact us — we would like to support you (both financially and with the broad coverage on Smashing Magazine).
You may be interested in the following free WordPress-themes as well:
Veronica
October 23rd, 2009 10:23 pmIt doesn’t look like it supports widgets :(
ranma
October 24th, 2009 5:31 pm303 comments and nobody seems to notice, that the style.css contains an error everywhere where serif fonts are used. there’s no “s” in the “serif” definition :) great theme anyway!
Alyssa
October 28th, 2009 7:53 pmLOVE this theme. Love it!
But I’m having problems with the latest 1.5 version that I’ve downloaded. My Archives page now contains my About Me information.
It is widget-aware now but they are not formatted to match the rest of the graphics of the theme so they look out of place.
Also, the tab at the bottom titled What Is This Place also pulls my About Me info as well. How do I edit that info???
Thanks for any help you can offer!
Alyssa
diseño web chile
November 21st, 2009 8:02 pmI have seen diseño web chile a blog that used a nice theme, but this themes are beautiful, nice, nice
Murali
November 23rd, 2009 6:15 pmI have downloaded the theme and trying to activate. I am getting gray blank page and after that, if I activate the theme then white blank page is coming. I am using WP 2.6.3. Any Idea
Murali
November 23rd, 2009 7:51 pmTheme “notepad-chaos-version-2-0″ not working with WP 2.6.3. Any one faced same problem. Please guide me if any fix is there.
ruben
November 28th, 2009 11:36 pmLove this theme but need one thing and have no idea on how to do it. I want to change the page background to a different color I tried using plugin in WP but it does not change the entire background. Im new to this so please if someone know how to change the background color please give me a step by step.
Thanks You
Ruben
Philippines Freelance Designer
November 30th, 2009 7:38 amWow this template is great. Maybe i will used this in my one of my blog. As a Philippines Freelance Designer, i really appreciate the artistic design of this wordpress themplate.
Thanks for sharing it for free…
Noora
November 30th, 2009 12:56 pmlove love love this theme!!!
but am new to WP ( using .com) and have no idea how to get this as the theme on my blog…can anyone help??? please!
sarah
December 5th, 2009 8:12 amso cute theme…can i get one??
Jérémy Wanderscheid
December 6th, 2009 2:34 amHello,
I’m currently working on a french translation of this great theme, I will probably add some functions like dynamic sidebar.
My problem is the graphic files used for sidebar title, if I want to translated them I need to have the source files of these images to do a good and beautiful job. If someone can provide me these files I think my translated theme will be better.
Thanks in advance
Wendy Beresford
January 4th, 2010 8:22 pmGreat theme. only problem is when viewing with Internet Explorer 6. The yellow post-it for Recent Posts is broken. The top part of the Post-it displays correctly (with Recent Posts text), then there is a large gap, the length of Pages and Categories in column 2, before the bottom part of Recent Posts displays (containing links to posts) this looks bad.
See it here: http://www.wendyberesford.co.uk
Can anyone help please?
Bart Bruijnesteijn
February 19th, 2010 1:11 amYou should loose IE6, it gives problems with a lot of websites as it doesn’t adhere to standards, I know from professional experiences working with big corporate websites. If you want to stick with IE, go for the more recenter versions. But I should also consider better alternatives like Firefox
lixiphp
January 14th, 2010 1:10 amgreat！cool！
burak
January 15th, 2010 4:13 amhi all i use this theme for my site ( http://www.nelazimdi.net ) but i have a problem. i want to change themes language with poedit but i can.t find .po file. can you help me pls. thanx ala
Alicia
February 10th, 2010 11:32 amAny idea how to change the number of recent posts that show up on the yellow post it on the side?
antek
February 24th, 2010 2:22 pmhas this site asked for permission to modify? I can not find information
http://www.prosopopeyadivagante.com/
yessica
March 17th, 2010 6:13 pmumm i new to this and i have this wordpress account and i want this theme i just dont know how to put it there i download it already but the rest im clueless and i really want this theme
theotix
March 23rd, 2010 5:40 amHello
je le met tout de suite sur mon site
I’m french
traduction:
I immediately put it on my site (roughly)
Bye
valentina
March 31st, 2010 4:53 pmMe encanta (i love it) felicitaciones!! (congrats!) fué el que más me gustó de 100 opciones. (it´s the best of 100 options i found in the internet)
SAludos
bye bye people
agentk98
May 2nd, 2010 8:46 amI am using this theme now! Thanks!
Sorry for the noob question… How do i remove the footer that says:
What is this place? This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
Bettina From Denmark
May 6th, 2010 4:00 amI really would like to have this theme too but I can´t make it right. Could one off you send me the code that I could copy and paste ???? Please.
ardywong
May 17th, 2010 10:44 pmone or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
evan skuthorpe
May 29th, 2010 12:20 ama nice theme, looking at the files now!
60-inch
June 25th, 2010 9:16 amfué el que más me gustó de 100 opciones
Temp
June 30th, 2010 2:58 amAwesome Them….good work…
sky
July 13th, 2010 8:46 pmnice theme ,so great
Gramps
July 30th, 2010 12:26 pmLove the theme… but I’m unable to get the “more” feature to work.
I’ve even downloaded a plugin called Evermore and it also does not work with the theme.
I’ve looked at it the Preview and Publish mode and neither have this feature working.
Please advise.
Gramps
July 30th, 2010 3:27 pmForgot to give you the details of my computer setup:
Am running WinXP Home edition
Computer is a Dell
Browser is FireFox
I’ve tried publishing the post and still the More feature isn’t working.
Please advise.
Gramps
July 31st, 2010 12:15 amFound a solution to my problem … and it was as simple as a single line of code.
Solution was found here:
http://www.rlmseo.com/blog/read-more-link-on-wordpress-pages/
Max
September 10th, 2010 3:15 amThis theme definitely rocks but I’m wondering how to change the ‘About’ and ‘Archives’ buttons. What’s the name of the font you used ’cause I can’t find it.
Thanks.
olvi
September 15th, 2010 1:10 amgreat theme, for some reason I thought it fit my domain perfectly ;)
http://www.weedjunk.com/
thanks !
réda mozonbazi
September 17th, 2010 8:28 amvous voulez
Thiago
November 4th, 2010 9:02 pmIts pretty good
yoli
November 10th, 2010 9:11 amthank u so much
nice site
Debbie
December 3rd, 2010 7:57 pmIs Notepad Chaos widget ready?
It’s a very cool theme, but I can’t seem to find that bit of information.
Thanks in advance!
Tim
January 2nd, 2011 9:14 pmGreat theme. This tutorial might help you resolve issue that the repetitive can get cut off if the height is not a multiple of the background image height.
http://justjquery.com/lab/heighttest/
Mustafa
February 12th, 2011 10:38 amthanks a lot
vee
August 5th, 2011 5:22 amwhat a nice theme ! can i use it on my blog ? what is the HTML code?
xxxthanksxxx
heyh
August 6th, 2011 4:17 amhow to download this
beginner
August 8th, 2011 6:47 amhow to use this in
html
BG
August 12th, 2011 6:39 pmHi there
Just wondering once I download the psd files and alter in photoshop, how do I get the changes back to html, or to whatever file necessary? Then do I need to upload to? So it shows on my blog?
Thanking you!!!