The Icon Theme Specification has been in use now for a while, in several desktops, including KDE and Gnome. However, there has never been any centralized direction on how to name the icons that are available for use by applications, when creating a theme. This has meant that artists have historically had to duplicate many icons, in order for their themes to work across desktop environments.

This specification aims to solve this problem, by laying out a standard naming scheme for icon creation, as well as providing a minimal list of must have icons, and a larger list with many more examples to help with the creation of extended icons for third party applications, devices, and new MIME types.