Took the idea from someone on the Playstation forums who used the PS3 (or PSP) icons and put stuff under them. All of mine actually had a function depending on the icons, example; the "Computer" icon linked me to My Copmuter, "Documents" to My Documents and so on.
On the cleanliness part, well I dont like a cluttered desktop. I rarely have more than 10 icons on it so every few days I take everything I have on it (exes, songs... pretty much anything downloaded) and put it on a folder on the C: drive. The exeption was with the XP theme on that pic. I wouldve liked to do it in Ubuntu because the top icons could be made bigger, but I wouldnt be able to put anything under the "Game" icon.