Rockstar Icon Designer - Kate McInnes [46]
Designing Icons for Windows
Microsoft Windows uses a variety of icon sizes ranging from 16px to 256px. Windows 95 to XP use 16 to 48px and Windows Vista and above use a variety of icon sizes from 16 to 256px.
Their usage and scale is mostly unchanged through Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and XP. Windows Vista introduces a new fluid approach to icon sizes, allowing users to select a custom icon view from 16x16 to 256x256. The scaling is done in-program by using bi-cubic interpolation. This form of scaling allows Windows to map the difference between the icon sizes and render an approximation of a size in-between the two. This is how the scaling appears to be fluid rather than the stepped scaling you may see when cycling though the actual icons. Because of this scaling method, it is important that all of the icons you produce for the windows platform are the same design, with the exception of the 16px icon, which can be a simplified version of the main design with no drop shadow effects of perspective.
If you're creating icons for Windows XP through to Windows 7 you can use the following style guidelines.
Windows XP
Icons from Windows XP are bright and stylized.
With the release of Windows 7, the number of people using Windows XP is on the decline, but with the reluctance for people to change to Windows Vista for a variety of stability and usability issues, there's still a large number of people developing for and using programs with Windows XP.
Microsoft officially ended mainstream support for XP in 2009 with extended support scheduled to end in 2014, so it's unlikely that you will need to create this style of icon. In any case, it's useful to know the restrictions relating to an older style platform. The following is the main style to follow when creating icons for XP and the various sizes and formats that you will need to create.
Background
The style of the Windows XP icons may look a bit too bold and bright when compared to modern Windows icons or even icons from Mac OS X 10 which was released the same year, but it's important to remember the time in which they were released. Microsoft had a huge market share, the internet was being adopted by households the world over and the computer interface was in need of an update that differentiated it from the old work station computers of the Windows 95 era. 32-bit icons were also new to Windows and the XP design was formulated to show off the new smooth edges that alpha cannels could create and the brighter, more varied color palette that was also newly available to the icon designers. Again, while the style may have fallen out of favor for a more polished look, XP was hugely successful for the Microsoft Corporation and has been installed on 400 million computers. As of June 2011, Windows XP was the most widely used Computer OS in the world with a 39.7% market share, closely followed by Windows 7 with 37.8%.[12]
Style
If you take a look at the MSDN guidelines for XP icons, you will see that the specified style is all about fun, color, and energy. Without a visual example of this style you would be forgiven for believing that the intended style was in-line with the old Copland Gizmo theme. In actual fact, the style adopts a soft yet bright color scheme chosen to match the blue tones used in Microsoft branding and an object style that's rounded and more illustrative than representative of the objects they depict. An outline in a slightly darker tone is used to differentiate the various elements of the icon and to help create a crisp outline. Because the majority of the icons were 32px and commonly viewed on CRT monitors, the outline was a great way to use the color variance and transparency of the 32-bit images without losing clarity.
The two main views for XP style icons are a fake isometric style with a slight one-point perspective with the icons facing right and a simplified front view version for the 16px icons. The guidelines don't go into much detail about the specific viewing