Software:Tango Desktop Project

Short description: Open source initiative

Tango Desktop Project

Example of the Tango Icon Library
Developer(s)	Tango Project contributors
Initial release	2005 (2005)
Final release	v0.8.90 / February 25, 2009 (2009-02-25)
Type	Computer icons
License	Icons: CC-by-sa 2.5 Icons since v0.8.90: Public domain Icon Naming Utilities tool: GPL
Website	http://tango.freedesktop.org

The Tango Desktop Project's Color Palette

The Tango Desktop Project was an open-source initiative to create a set of design guidelines and to provide a consistent user experience for applications on desktop environments. The project created a set of icons known as the Tango Icon Library and that were described as a "proof of concept". The Tango Desktop Project was a project of freedesktop.org, and was closely linked with other freedesktop.org guidelines, such as the Standard Icon Theming Specification.

Objectives

The objective of the project was to allow software developers to easily integrate their software, in terms of appearance, with the desktop computer. The visual inconsistencies that arise from different desktop environments (such as KDE, GNOME, or Xfce) and custom distributions make it hard for third parties to target Linux. Ideally, any project that follows the Tango guidelines will have a look and feel that matches well with other icons and applications that follow the guidelines.

The style did not aim to be visually unique to distinguish itself. Instead, a secondary aim of the project was to create a standard style that makes applications look appropriate running on operating systems common at that time, such that independent software vendors would find that their application did not look out of place on Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME, or Xfce.

Apart from the visual guidelines, the project aimed to provide a set of common metaphors for the icons. Tango followed the freedesktop.org's Standard Icon Theming Specification and actively developed 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, have started to follow the Tango style guidelines for their icons. Also, ReactOS uses Tango icons, as does Mozilla Firefox 3 when it is unable to find the user's installed icon set or for icons not covered by said icon set.

It is also possible for proprietary closed-source applications to use Tango Desktop Project icons. Examples highlighted by the Tango Showroom include VMware Workstation 6 and Medsphere OpenVista CIS.

History

The Tango icons were originally released under a copyleft Creative Commons license (Attribution-ShareAlike), but were released into the public domain in 2009 in order to make it easier to reuse them.

Palette

This is the hexadecimal color palette used by the Tango Desktop Project, organized by color group and brightness:

Butter	fce94f	edd400	c4a000
Orange	fcaf3e	f57900	ce5c00
Chocolate	e9b96e	c17d11	8f5902
Chameleon	8ae234	73d216	4e9a06
Sky Blue	729fcf	3465a4	204a87
Plum	ad7fa8	75507b	5c3566
Scarlet Red	ef2929	cc0000	a40000
Aluminium	eeeeec	d3d7cf	babdb6
	888a85	555753	2e3436

See also

• Adwaita (design language) – The design language of GNOME
• Bluecurve – former default GPL icon set of Fedora, replaced by Echo
• Crystal – LGPL icon set by Geraldo Coelho
• Icon (computing)
• Nuvola – LGPL icon set by David Vignoni
• Oxygen Project – LGPL icon set for KDE
• Palette (computing)
• Theme (computing)
• ReactOS – uses the Tango Icon Library

External links

• Tango Icon Library version 0.8.90 — in tar.gz archive format
• "Tango project aims to clean up the desktop" on Linux.com
• Standard Icon Theming Specification
• Icon Naming Specification
• Tango Patcher 2600 8.06