The Tango Project was launched at the Gnome Summit in Boston by Jakub Steiner, a member of Novell Inc’s product design team, and Steven Garrity, leader of the Mozilla visual identity team.
The project has been set up with the aim of unifying the visual style of free desktop software, with initial work on a base icon library, style guide, and standard naming specification for icons, to make it possible to create icons will work on multiple platforms, such as the Gnome and KDE Linux desktop interfaces.
Much of the work on the latter has been done by Rodney Dawes of Novell’s Ximian team, while Steiner has done much of the work on the base icon library, according to Garrity. The announcement of the Tango project follows the launch of Novell’s openSUSE Better Desktop initiative, which seeks to improve the quality of desktop Linux.
The announcement of a plan to unify the visual style of open source desktops has been well-received judging by responses to the various blog posting announcing the Tango Project, as well as the number of people wanting to get more information. The Project Tango web site appeared to have been overwhelmed by traffic at press time.
