The Tango Desktop Project aims to give a consistent user experience for applications on different free and 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, etc.) and custom distributions make it hard for third parties to target Linux. A common misconception is that the project aims to give an icon theme that works across the major desktop environments (like Bluecurve).

The style does not aim to be visually unique to distinguish itself. The secondary aim 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 that their application do not look out of place on Windows XP, Mac OS X, KDE, GNOME, or Xfce.

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

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

Firefox 3

The icon set of the Linux version of Firefox is being redesigned to follow the Tango style. Current progress can be viewed at http://tango.freedesktop.org/Firefox.