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Last year, some of our readers complained about the lack of diversity in the sets we released in 2008. We heard you, came up with new ideas and decided to offer our readers a wider variety of sets. From now on, we are going to release more specific, more practical and (hopefully) more useful icon sets — not just social icons or RSS icons. We start 2009 with a stationery icon set, a soccer icon set and a fresh Atlantic WordPress theme. Please let us know if we are on the right track.

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Stationery Icon Set

This is a useful set of 22 vector icons (256 by 256 pixels). It contains book, brush, crayon, clip, color pencils, document, eraser, pad, palette, post-it note, scale and scissors, as well as the Fireworks source file. In particular, you may want to use the set in corporate designs and on blogs for various purposes. The set was designed by Deziner Folio and is released in conjunction with Smashing Magazine as a gift to our readers and the design community.

• Large preview
• Download the set (.zip, 2.8 MB, including Fireworks source file)
• Release post on Deziner Folio

Soccer Icon Set

We are aware it’s winter out there right now, but it’s always good to prepare for summer early, right? This set was designed with the owners of sport-related websites in mind. If you are a fan or have designed a soccer-related website, these icons may come in handy. The set contains 8 icons in resolutions ranging from 32×32 to 512×512 pixels. It was designed by the design agency Artua especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

• Large preview
• Download the set (.zip, 2.8 MB, including Fireworks source file)

Motivation behind the design

Here are some insights from the designers of the theme:

Soccer is the thing that inspired us to create this icon set. Being the most popular game in the world, it can also be a great source of inspiration!

These icons are meant to be used on the desktops of soccer fans, but even if you don’t like soccer or don’t know what a penalty kick is, but you like the shapes and colors, feel free to download them!

We also have a small request for you all who like to download icons from Smashing Magazine: please tell us which theme for the next free icon set you would like the most!

Thank you, guys!

Atlantic WordPress Theme

Atlantic WordPress theme was designed by the design agency Farktory from Turkey. It has two fixed-width columns and is cross-browser consistent and SEO-ready. The theme uses sIFR for headlines and includes a built-in Twitter application, gravatar support and Flickr RSS support.

Download the theme for free!

The theme is released under the GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

• Full preview (1.1 MB)
• Download the theme (.zip, 0.4 MB)

Motivation behind the design

Here are some insights from the designer himself:

The Web has changed. Blogs have to change, too, in order to keep abreast of the times. The first way to achieve this renewal is by modifying our themes. But it’s hard to find a harmonized theme for both blogger and reader.

On our crew, everybody has a blog, and we know the difficulties of this stuff. So we researched for a very long time before revising our themes. We were fortunate to be able to search, experiment, try new and old themes and also see all the comments about themes throughout Smashing Magazine. Then we asked a question of some bloggers: “What do you need in your blogs?” Based on their answers, we made a list of necessities. From this list, one of our interface designers, Ali, designed this dream-like theme and played PES while designing it. (We were certain that the theme would be all green, but he surprised us!) :) Our front-end developer, Çağatay, converted the artwork to CSS, HTML and PHP. Our interface designer, Murat, tested the theme. I only gave it a name: Atlantic!

Why Atlantic? Because the theme reminds me oceans: their color, happiness and power. As I said, we all have blogs and use WordPress. Like everyone else, we use social media tools (social networks, sharing platforms, micro-blogs, etc.). If blogs are a reflection of our personalities, then they have to include our social media contents. So we attached Flickr and Twitter gadgets to our theme.

Also, we didn’t forget the classic WordPress functions. :)

We didn’t want to release our theme on any other website than our lovely Smashing Magazine. We are so thankful to Vitaly. He has always supported us. God bless you, man! :)

Hope you all like the Atlantic theme.

Gülnur, from Farktory, Istanbul, Turkey.

And thanks again, guys!

Which freebies did you like? What would you like to see released next? Please let us know in the comments to this post.

(al)