This month’s featured WordPress theme is Notepad Chaos by Smashing Magazine.
Notepad Chaos is Smashing Magazine’s latest free WordPress theme, and one of their best in my opinion. It’s got an attention-grabbing background image, and an overall pleasant notepad look. It’s not widget ready out of the box (though you could conceivably modify it to be so), but it’s very customizable if you know your way around Photoshop. Smashing Magazing was kind enough to release the original PSD file along with the theme, to do with as you will. You could replace the background image with one of your own making by editing the PSD, or you could go wild and really make the theme your own. It would be fairly easy to port the theme to a different CMS as well, with the PSD available and all.
The paperclipped/tacked scraps of paper are a nice touch — though one wonders why someone would put a tack in a notepad. The search and Post-It links look good, though I’m not a huge fan of the lack of expandability there (forget adding another link to the navigation…). The footer is fairly well done as well, featuring part of your About page under a “What is this place?” legend.
I really like the notepad motif, and think that a really good job was done with this theme.
