However, I find it ironic that recently, Apple chose to make the new folder icons in OS X 10.5 Leopard with the frontal approach as well and Apple has been notorious about complaining about other people copying them.

Well, I have been amazed by Oxygen since the Oxygen website and its previews went online. I greatly look forward to the release of Oxygen and KDE4.

Keep up the great work!

I think it is worth it to have the other try as a folder set as well, but as default in an Desktop Environment there should be a professional icon theme.

So David, just continue your great work.

I dont think it’s up to you, but having folders who display the type of content in it - like documents or a photograph - would be really cool, and would increase usability a lot.

The only problem I see is about the scaling…
It would be really hard to make it good-looking at all sizes.

In my opinion, latter from 2005 and former from 2006 are the best. Really. Let me try to explain why:

1) I don’t care if it’s frontal or not. I judge the style, the recognition. It could be even flipped downside if it’ll suite my needs :)
2) The former 2006 looks extremely polished, stylish, it was amazingly easy to read what’s inside - almost perfect :)

You put three points for the new one:

1) It’s easier to read when it’s small. So F* what? I know that designers tends to think that smaller is always better, but users not. Look at the Dolphin, Vista, Mac OS X. Part of the “coolness” effect is because there are BIG icons that looks GOOD. I will see the small icons a lot of times, agree, but I’ll also sometimes see it as 64×64 or 128×128. What then? The new approach doesn’t look that good in big scale. Sorry. Maybe you should think about LOD (level of details)? In small mode present simplified icon, in big mode more detailed, polished one (with blends, shadows, sheet of paper inside, etc.)?
2) It’s light - I, as a user, really don’t care if it’s 206 kb or 20 kb. Please, don’t use it as a pros ;p
3) You must take a look at it in real life. I did. It’s ok. But it doesn’t solve any of concerns I brought.

Another thing is that I really would love to be sure that the new icon will change depending on the content of the folder. It should have picture if it’s a folder with pics, it should contain video if the folder does, it should contain docs if the folder does.

It would be extremely sweet if it could contain more sheets if the folder contains a lot of documents, and just a single if there’s less than 10 documents inside (to indicate if the folder is stuffed or not). In case it has mixed content it could indicate it by small boxes of types of documents that are inside flowing inside the icon.

I really dream of the dynamic icons worls where the icon can represent a lot more data about what’s inside the dir, or what’s the status of the document (opened, playable, progress of download, etc.) and I think that your new icons has potential, but doesn’t exploit it to the end.

Constructive ideas:

1) Maybe make the back of the folder less curved. It doesn’t look that natural
2) Consider re-adding the cut on the top-left corner of the front. It made it easier for me to recognize that it’s a folder. As many others I can say that IMHO it doesn’t look like a folder for newbies. More - it doesn’t look like anything.
3) Please, rethink the idea of adding back the sheet. Or keep it like that for an empty folder, and add a sheet if there are docs inside. That would be actually best for me :D

I can just say that you must try the icon theme.

Please don’t repeat the Keramik fiasco again. A end user interact with the UI, and don’t matter if KDE 4 have lots of wonderful technologies under the hood, if it’s look bad a lot of people will not use it.

Please don’t bash me, I’m just worried about the directions you are taking.