Tango Desktop Project

The Tango Desktop Project is a freedesktop.org project with the goal of providing users with a unified desktop interface. It provides developers with a consistent icon theme available, as the different design of the graphical user interface of Microsoft Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE and GNOME developers makes it hard to integrate programs visually. Programs that use the icons that follow the tango style, should be Fit externally well despite the different surfaces.

Objectives

The project defines inter alia, a strict standard for the design of icons. This includes a fixed color palette as well as prescribed frame widths and perspectives. The icons themselves do not aim to stand out from the icon sets from other systems, but in order to be quickly recognizable as part of the icon sets even possible unique and for the user. The default now enjoys such high esteem that other manufacturers who have nothing to do with the project or the open source scene, create icons that follow the standards so that their applications on Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME or Xfce not look out of place.

Apart from these so-called "visual guidelines", the project 's goal is to find recognizable names for the icons. The project follows the Tango freedesktop.org standard for iconset name (default Icon Theming Specification) and brings the Freedesktop.org standard ahead to Iconbenennung (Standard Icon Naming Specification).

Use

In the open source community and the Tango style guidelines are widely accepted. Meanwhile, use common software like GIMP, Scribus, Inkscape, which is still lesser known ReactOS, and GNOME icons that adhere to this standard. Since version 3, and the Mozilla Firefox browser on Linux uses the Tango icons.

Even proprietary software, the icons that were created as part of the Tango Desktop project use. Well-known closed-source software of this kind is for example VMWare Workstation 6 and Medsphere Open Vista CIS.

Since version 0.8.90 are the icons public domain, previous versions were under the Creative Commons Attribution Share -Alike License.

Color palette

The following color palette is used by the Tango Desktop Project, sorted by color and brightness places: