Improve usability by making programs, objects, and actions easier to identify, learn, and find.Strongly impact users' overall impression of your program's visual design, and appreciation for its fit-and-finish.Improve the visual communication of your program.Toolbar icons have less detail and no perspective, to optimize for smaller sizes and visual distinctiveness.

Wherever practical, fixed document icons are replaced by thumbnails of the content, making documents easier to identify and find.

These high-resolution icons allow for high visual quality in list views with large icons.

Icons have a maximum size of 256x256 pixels, making them suitable for high-dpi (dots per inch) displays.

Icons are symbolic images they should look better than photorealistic!

The style is more realistic than illustrative, but not quite photorealistic.

Windows Vista icons differ from Windows XP-style icons in the following ways: The Aero aesthetic creates a high quality and elegant experience that facilitates user productivity and even drives an emotional response. Aero aims to establish a design that is both professional and beautiful. Aero stands for: authentic, energetic, reflective, and open. Design conceptsĪero is the name for the user experience of Windows Vista, representing both the values embodied in the design of the aesthetics, as well as the vision behind the user interface (UI).

Note: Guidelines related to standard icons are presented in a separate article. Windows Vista introduces a new style of iconography that brings a higher level of detail and sophistication to Windows. Icons are pictorial representations of objects, important not only for aesthetic reasons as part of the visual identity of a program, but also for utilitarian reasons as shorthand for conveying meaning that users perceive almost instantaneously. Much of the guidance still applies in principle, but the presentation and examples do not reflect our current design guidance. This design guide was created for Windows 7 and has not been updated for newer versions of Windows.

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