What is new in Windows Vista Icons?

Windows Vista Icons | Editing Vista icons | Windows Vista Icon FAQs

Windows Vista™ by Microsoft released on January 2007, has many creative and new features. One of the most visible changes is the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Windows Vista Aero™ has got a slicker interface with sharper graphics. These changes are not only visual, but also been designed to accompany the computer technology for further decade. As well it has new features implemented to support the hardware changes that will come in future.

Windows Vista is a Resolution-Independent User Interface

this means that the most important enhancements of Aero is its ability to deal with the high-resolution displays of the future, it's the only way how it handled a resolution-independent UI. Now a day monitors have a resolution of 96-DPI that is dots/pixels per inch generally. So put 48x48 icons displayed on whole screen in a half-inch square.

But may be in future LCD screens will have a resolutions up to 240/320 DPI. So to display at the actual size as well as without any quality loss, these icons must include much larger images. And that is the reason why windows Vista introduces a new standard for Windows icon size: 256x256 pixels.

The following displayed image is the screenshot of the windows Vista File Explorer displaying icons using the maximum resolution, is 256x256. This same will be a bit large on a 96-DPI screen, but this technology has been designed considering the future screens as well.

Also one more additional option is there which permit to display icons at smaller sizes more attune to medium-res screens say 150-DPI screens. In this case Aero uses the 256x256 image and shrinks it the desired size without a quality-loss.

Windows Vista 256x256 PNG Compressed Icons

The standard Windows Vista icons includes 12 formats as listed below :

1. 256x256 - RGB/A
2. 48x48 - RGB/A
3. 32x32 - RGB/A
4. 16x16 - RGB/A
5. 256x256 - 256 colors
6. 48x48 - 256 colors
7. 32x32 - 256 colors
8. 16x16 - 256 colors
9. 256x256 - 16 colors
10. 48x48 - 16 colors
11. 32x32 - 16 colors
12. 16x16 - 16 colors

when you make an icon and save it in standard Windows XP ICO format, the result file will take around 400Kb space on the disk. The only way to reduce this size is by compressing the images. But in it also only the 256x256 images are compressed.

The compression scheme used is Portable Network Graphic (PNG), as it only has a good lossless ratio as well as supports alpha channel. Also the tests showed that the compressed icon sizes are 100Kb to 150Kb.

Following images give you idea how the different formats of the icons can look like.