Win95 - Style Icons

[NacreousDreams]

Hello, vvorld! I come back once every blue moon because I keep forgetting to check up on the site... BUT I remembered I made these Win95-style icons a while ago, back when I was trying to go for that style on my Windows laptop. So I figure I'd share them with the class, since I think you all'd get a kick out of it.

If you'd like me to make you an icon of your own, let me know and I'll get right on it! I really like working with the Win95 palette.

Aseprite
Avast Antivirus
MagicaVoxel
NetBeansIDE
OBS Studio
Reason
Steam
VirtualBox
Visual Studio
VLC
Zoom

[SilkSkull]

Hey I love these designs! Is it alright if I snatch em up for my desktop? Also I would love if you could do one for the retroarch logo!

[Memory]

16 colours with a fixed palette consisting of only 6 colour tones with light and dark each and 4 black/white gradients.
Looks like they were obsessed with checkerboards back then and diffusion was yet to be invented.

[NacreousDreams]

Retroarch

There's a shadow applied to the Retroarch icon, but it's not visible on the default Melonland theme. Open it in a new tab to see the full image.

Hey I love these designs! Is it alright if I snatch em up for my desktop?

Absolutely, Silkskull! I'd be glad if you did!

16 colours with a fixed palette consisting of only 6 colour tones with light and dark each and 4 black/white gradients.
Looks like they were obsessed with checkerboards back then and diffusion was yet to be invented.

This is fascinating to me: Windows 95 was made on far inferior hardware to what we have today, so to save on memory, they limited the computer's colors to 16.

The checkerboard dithering is actually their way of imitating diffusion. Notice how, if you squint your eyes, the checkerboards in the icons you linked sort of blend into one color, or a gradient in the case of the soccer ball?

Fuzzy, low-quality monitors back then actually did this automatically, so dithering wasn't such a bad technique for faking colors. You might be able to see it in games for the GBA actually, for the same reasons!