Tango Icon theme in Context (Palette and Icon Library too)

The Tango Project
Role: Art and Design Director
The Tango project was a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) UI initiative aimed at creating a color palette, an icon theme and a set of icon and art guidelines for use across FOSS desktop projects. It was sponsored by Novell, and widely adopted by the GNOME and KDE communities for projects as diverse as photo management applications, music players, email and calendaring systems, desktop utilities, search tools and the control center. I led the development of the Tango project, managing its scope, its deliverables, its release cycles and its community adoption strategies.

Tango assisted developers in making their applications look “like they belonged” on systems ranging from Linux to BSD to legacy Windows systems and Mac OS desktops. This ability to consistently theme applications added a degree of usability, accessibility and professionalism to community-driven projects which had not existed in the past. For the first time in the history of FOSS projects, applications could appear origin-neutral; whether they came from a KDE developer, a GNOME developer or some other FOSS platform, they shared a common look and feel.