Smashing Magazine - we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

As you may or may not know, we love to smash freebies around. Today we are glad to release the Web Developer icons set, designed by Pedja Rusic, a WP Smashing WordPress theme, designed by Greg Johnson and a Cafe icon set, designed by Enk. All icons and the theme are available for free download and can be used without any restrictions whatsoever. Please feel free to suggest ideas for next icon sets or single icons in the comments to this post.

[Offtopic: by the way, do you know the Smashing Network has its own Smashing Network RSS Feed? Only excerpts are displayed in the feed.]

Web Developer Icons Set

We have noticed Pedja Rusic from Serbia over a year ago, when we presented his icon sets in our free icons round-up. A while ago we contacted him and commissioned the design of icons dedicated to designers and developers. The icons should pay close attention to the smallest details, look original, cool and still remain recognizable.

The result of Pedja’s work is the Web Developer Icons Set, a set of 34 icons designed from scratch; these icons are primarily supposed to be used by bloggers and designers. The icons are available in the resolutions .ico, .icns and .png in various resolutions up to 512×512px. The set contains icons Comments icon, Home, Mail, RSS and user-related icons.

Download the set for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

• preview
• download (.zip, 10.2 Mb)

Inspiration behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designer himself:

The design of icons for this set was definitely the most difficult one in my career. I never had more trouble while the makin’ was in progress. My computer exploded 2 times, I had several losses in my family, my airport and modem were damaged… etc. The set was supposed to be launched like the year before, but considering all the difficutes that have happend, I consider myself one persistan bastard! Plus I was attacked by a dog in my house while i was doing the set… So I give the most hardest, and mind blowing set of icons I ever made!

WP Smashing WordPress Theme

We are always looking for creative and unusual concepts and we are always glad to support designers and developers to implement the idea and make it available to the public. Just recently we released the ViewPort WordPress Theme that presents the content in a single-page-’viewport’ and showcasing bloggers’ posts in a visually appealing form. Magazeen theme uses drop-down-menus and an automated jQuery-based image showcase and thus makes image manipulation for posts easier and more flexible.

Greg Johnson’s theme WP Smashing is also an example for such kind of themes. The main goal of the theme was to display WordPress posts in calendar format. The theme is widget-ready, WordPress 2.7 compatible, has an integrated configurable calendar functionality and a configurable contact form. Installation guidelines are provided in the package. The .PSD-source file is included as well.

Download the theme for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

• live demo
• large preview
• download (.zip, PSD source file included, 1.3 Mb)
• release post on Bustatheme.com

Inspiration behind the design

As usual, here are some insights from the designer himself:

WP SMASHING started out as an exercise in displaying WordPress posts in calendar format. The uses for this kind of functionality are obvious and I haven’t come across a plugin or theme that accomplished this goal in the manner I was after.

WP SMASHING accomplishes this by way of a companion plugin, written specifically for this theme. Knowing that not everyone will want to display their posts this way, the plugin offers you the ability to choose how you want to display posts on the index and in the archive — using a calendar or a two-column listing of post excerpts (much like Smashing Magazine). If you choose to display posts as a calendar, the titles of each post are displayed for each day. If the title(s) are larger than the relatively small square allotted for a calendar day, a custom scroll bar is shown allowing the user to scroll through your posts.

WP SMASHING is completely widget-ready and features 4 configurable ’side bars’. One of these side bars is the right column — navigation — on every page except for if/when the calendar is displayed. The other 3 side bars are incorporated into footer. Also integrated into the footer is a contact form which includes validation and also includes options in the companion plugin.

Bonus: Café Icon Set

Last year we decided to stop releasing “social” icon setes in 2009, since there were way too many similar sets out there. However, when a beautiful set comes along, it is sometimes really hard to say ‘no’. This is the basic reason why this post also offers the set “Café Icon Set” as bonus to the first set. This set was designed by Enk from Hyderabad, Pakistan especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers. The set contains 9 .png-images in the formats 256×256px, including 8 social icons (Twitter, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Mixx, Delicious, RSS) and Smashing Magazine.

Download the set for free!

You can use the set for all of your projects for free and without any restrictions. You can freely use it for both your private and commercial projects, including software, online services, templates and themes. The set may not be resold, sublicensed, rented, transferred or otherwise made available for use. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word.

• preview
• download (.zip, 0.5 Mb)
• release post on Chidimar.com

Thank you, guys! We truly appreciate your efforts.