Is there a way to make the desktop icons disappear?

Hello! I love having an empty desktop (for aesthetic purposes) and there's always the icon of my hard drive on ma' desktop. Now I recently bought a macbook pro, and there are no icons (YAY!) unless I put in an external hard drive or a CD or something like that (BOO!) so I want to know if there's a way to get rid of the hard drive icon on my desktop of my mac pro (which is the one that has the icon) or better yet... MAKE THEM DISAPPEAR!!!!! Thanks guys!

Finder - Preferences - General Tab

More info here

Ah, thanks a ton, mate! Really appreciate it! Didn't quite find the preferences but I used the Command+coma command to open the window.