Here’s a quick tutorial that will definitely come in handy in a lot of situations. I’ve had to simulate this in this in the past when one of my clients started a blogging site about Windows Vista, and they wanted a Wordpress theme that looked like Vista. I’m also providing skins for some of my PHP applications, and having a Vista clone is always a plus.

To start out, let’s use the Rounded Rectangle tool with the Radius set to 10px.

We’ll give this box a black outer glow with the Blend Mode set to

Now to add the body of the window, we will use the Rectangle Tool to create a white box in the center of our window. Once again, we’ll use a slight outer glow, this time with the default Screen blend mode, and a white color. We’re also going to use a dark gray stroke similar to the color we used for the outside of the window.

To create the side buttons, our first step will be to use the Rounded Rectangle tool in the upper right hand corner of our window. We’ll rasterize the layer and then use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to delete the area of the shape which extrudes from the window.