Creating Vista-Style Folder Icons

Question

How can I create Vista-style folder icons with something inside the folder?

imageres.dll (IIRC) contains icons for the front and back of a folder, and I can put my own image between them.

However, in the icons generated by Explorer from thumbnails, and in most of the prebuilt icons, the image within the folder is 3-dimensionally rotated, so that it appears to be sticking out of the folder.

I assume that is a skew transform; doers anyone know exactly how much I should skew my image?

Note that I'm not asking how to do it in Photoshop or programmatically; I'm asking what the parameters are.

Answer 1

Your first stop regarding user interface design questions like this nowadays should probably be Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (also available in PDF). Of course these guidelines feature articles about Aesthetics as well, in particular you'll find there a detailed chapter about Icons.

For various aspects of icon design these guidelines do in fact offer precise parameters, while for others they are at least offering value ranges or characteristics, see for example sections about Perspective, Light source and Shadows.

That said, lacking design skills myself, I don't think you'll find there dedicated parameters regarding your assumption that a single skew transform might do the trick; in fact a little more complex transformation seems to be needed to achieve the desired perspective effect as illustrated in the second example within section Perspective: Three-dimensional objects are represented in perspective as solid objects, seen from a low birds-eye view with two vanishing points. (An approximation via a skew/shear transform might still be possible as per my comment below though.)