Tango Desktop Project

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The Tango Desktop Project logo

The Tango Desktop Project aims to provide a consistent user experience for applications on different free/open-source desktop environments. The key objective of the project is to allow developers to easily integrate their software (in terms of appearance) with the desktop. The visual inconsistencies that arise from different desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, XFCE ...) and custom distribution's branding make it hard for 3rd parties to target Linux. A common misconception is that the project aims to provide an icon theme that works across the major desktop environments.

The style does not aim to be visually unique to separate itself. The secondary goal of the project is a style that makes applications look appropriate running on operating systems common at that time. ISVs providing icon artwork that follows the Tango style will find their application not looking out of place on Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME nor XFCE. A lot of the style has been inspired by the Firefox application icon set that worked well in most of these environments.

Apart from the visual guidelines, the project aims to provide a set of common metaphors for the icons. Tango follows the Freedesktop.org's Standard Icon Theming Specification and develops actively the Freedesktop.org's Standard Icon Naming Specification, defining names for the most common icons and the used metaphors.

Many free software projects, such as GIMP, Scribus, and GNOME started to follow the Tango style guidelines for their icons.