I often have small pieces of text on my desktop, such as phone numbers and reminders that I would like to have instant access to for a day or two. The usual way of putting small clippings on the desktop involves dragging the text to the desktop and making a text clipping. However, these take up a lot of space on the desktop and the text gets cut-off after a certain length. There is a better way to do this.
First, go into an icon editor such as Iconographer (the free trial will work fine), and draw a short horizontal line at the bottom of the drawing space. Then set the mask (opacity) of this line to about 12%. Anything lower and the Finder will not recognize the icon. Save this icon and paste it onto a blank folder. You will only have to do this once.
It will appear as if the folder has no icon, and clicking in the area above the text will not select the folder as usual, therefore saving a lot of desktop space, if you use larger icons. Then simply paste your short note into the folder name. If you want to have more than two lines, just duplicate the folder and position it right under the other. In Panther, you can make it stand out more by giving it a color label (or even color code to-do items by priortiy), as seen in the screenshot at left. And there you go. Space saving, colored notes on your desktop without third-party applications.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200411092040317