Following in the Kitn’s footsteps with her awesome tutorial on sticky tape I decided to come along with one of mine on how to make a folder like icon! So enjoy and I hope it’s easy enough to follow!

First step is to create a new document.  I used 450×450 to give myself plenty of room to work.

Select the Rounded Rectangle Tool, set it to 4px or whatever you want for the roundness and draw a folder shape on the document.  Doesn’t matter about the colour as we will use layer styles to sort that out anyway.

Now using the same tool draw another small rectangle about 1/3 the width of your big rectangle.  This will be the tab on the folder.

Next step is to duplicate the big rectangle.  Rasterize the small rectangle and the big rectangle beneath it, then merge them together.  That gives us the complete back to our folder.  At this point you should shift this layer to the bottom also.

Now lets work with the top layer which will be the open part of our folder.  Press CTRL+T and right click on the folder.  Select Skew and using the top middle part, move it a little to the right.  How much depends on how open you want your folder to look.  When you have it where you want it just hit enter.

Next lets squish it down so it looks right.  Again press CTRL+T and this time just move the same top middle point and move it down a little like shown below and when you have it where you want hit enter.

There we go you should have something that looks like a folder.  Now its time to make it look more than just a flat colour.  Lets add some layer styles to it.

When choosing your gradient overlay the colours are really up to you as it can be any colour you like.  Just pick your target colour first for the colour on the right and then choose a slightly darker colour for the start colour on the left.  Likewise with the stroke we just take the darkest colour and make even darker.

Using the oval select tool on a new layer draw a nice oval shape something like this.  Then using the gradient tool with white to transparent just add a little high lighting to the front part of our folder.  When your done CTRL+Click on the front part of the folder layer to select it, then press CTRL+SHIFT+i or using the menu Select>Invert and then just delete the left over.

Now lets add a little shadow to the inside.  CTRL+Click on the front part of the folder layer to select it.  Create a new layer in between the back and front.  Move the selection a little to the left and fill it with a darker colour in the same range as the folder (using the stroke colour would be just fine).  Press ALT+Backspace to fill it with your chosen colour.  Dont worry about it overlapping as we are about to get rid of that right now!  Using the filters menu choose Blur>Gaussian Blur (default options should work just fine).

CTRL+Click on the back layer of the folder and again Select>Invert followed by Backspace to remove any leftover shadow.

And there we have it! Play around with and add paper or anything you like!  I hope you find this tutorial useful.  Any comments are appreciated!  Here are some examples I whipped up using this technique.

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