10 Easy Ways To Customize Your Mac

Here are some ways to customize how your Mac looks without needing to spend a lot of time. You can change a variety of settings with just a switch or by making a few choices.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten quick and easy ways to customize the look of your Mac. 
So there are lots of different ways to customize how your Mac looks. I'm going to focus here on some that don't take much time or effort at all. 
First, the most obvious way to customize your Mac is to change your Desktop wallpaper. That's the huge graphic that you see behind everything. You go to System Settings and then look for Wallpaper. You can easily change this. You've got Apple's Dynamic Wallpapers and you've got a ton of these aerial views here. But if you scroll down you can also just change your Desktop background to a color, like this. Or even just make it black to really kind of have it no background at all. You can also choose your own picture either from the favorites in your Photos App from pictures in your Pictures folder or you can add anyone you want. For instance I'll just drag and drop this image here from the Finder into the box at the top. You can see how it will use that as my Desktop Wallpaper now. You can set how it fills the space. If you're good with graphics you can just create any image you like, like an illustration or take a photo of something specific and then use that as your Desktop Wallpaper. 
Now you can have more than just wallpaper back here. If you Control Click, two finger click or right click on the wallpaper you will get the ability to Edit Widgets. You can add a variety of different widgets. For instance you can add a clock. You can add a look at the batteries for your devices. You can add summaries from news and Notes. You can even add your own photos selecting a specific album and putting it there. So you can put photos of you loved ones right here on your Desktop. You can move these around and position them as you like. There are also some settings for this in System Settings and then Desktop & Dock and then scroll down to Widgets. You can have the style be Monochrome, Full Color, and you can even use widgets from your iPhone, ones that aren't normally available on the Mac. 
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Now another thing you may see all the time is the Screensaver. You can customize that. If you go into System Settings and then go to Screensaver you're going to get all these default macOS screensavers and you're going to get those same aerial views. But you also have a lot of old school things here under Other. For instance you can choose Photos and then choose an Album from your Photos Library or a folder full of photos. Once you choose an album you can set how it looks. So you have a variety of different ways that the slideshow that is now your screensaver will present itself. You can also choose some old school screensavers, like this one here and you can see a little preview. You can have the flow one. All sorts of different patterns and things. You can even setup a message to just be displayed on the Desktop. You can even use emoji characters there. You can have album artwork from your Music Library and Word of the Day as well. 
Now notice how in apps each app seems to have its own accent color. For instance, here in Notes it's yellow. In Numbers it's green. In Pages it's orange. You can customize that. If you go to System Settings and then go to Appearance you've got Accent Color here. Multicolor means that each app gets to use its own default color. But if you choose one of these other ones that will be used in all apps. So, for instance if I were to choose purple right here you can see now that Settings is now using purple. In addition so is Notes, so is Pages, and so is Numbers. While we're here note that you can control the Sidebar icons size. Look here in System Settings and you can see what happens when I change to Large, it also changes in Notes and in other apps as well. 
Now there is probably no easier way to change the look of your Mac than simply switching on Dark Mode. It is just a switch and it really changes everything. So go to Control Center here and then look for Display. Click on the little arrow here and it gives you all the display options. There is a button for Dark Mode, click that, and now you're in Dark Mode. You can see how dramatically everything has changed. 
Now I want to throw one in here that is not about how your Mac looks. But how it Sounds. If you go to System Settings and then go to Sound you've got your Alert Sound. You'll see a list here of sounds you can choose from. So you can just choose a different one of these. But you can also use any sound you want by putting a sound file in the right place. In the Finder choose Go and Hold Down the Option Key. You get Library. Now go and look for Sounds. Go into that folder and there is nothing there right now. But if you drag AIFF files to this it will add to the list of Alert Sounds. So I just added two files here. Now I have to Quit System Settings. Go back in again and then choose Sound and now I should see them here. Note I'm only going to see one. My Beep. I don't see that Bell sound here. That's because it's the wrong format. So make sure you use AIFF files, not MP3's, M4A or something else. 
Another thing that's pretty prominent on your Mac screen is the Dock here at the bottom. You can customize the Dock in a number of ways. Go into System Settings, go to Desktop & Dock and right here at the top you can change the size of the dock. You can turn on the Magnification feature, which is this. You can position it on the right or left side of the screen to look really different. I like to turn on Automatically Hide and Show the Dock so it disappears until I move my Pointer down to the bottom. Of course, you can customize what's here by clicking and dragging to rearrange the items. Drag Up to Remove items. Go into your Application's folder and Drag & Drop new items into the Dock to make it your own. 
Another thing you see all the time is the Pointer. This little arrow here in the middle. If you go into System Settings you can customize this. So you have to go to Accessibility and then Display. You can make the Pointer larger if you want. You can also change the outline color, so I'll make it a black outline. I'll change the Fill to a red like that to make my pointer kind of unique.
You also may spend a lot of time looking at Finder Windows and you can change how these look. Of course you have the ability to view as Icons, Lists, Columns, or Gallery. These settings, as well as most Finder settings, are on a per folder basis. So I'm changing how the Documents Folder looks now. Each folder has its own set. But in addition to those basics there you can go to View and Show View Options, or Command J. You've got a lot of controls here. I can make the icons bigger, for instance. I can change the Text Size as well. If I switch to another view type, like Icons, you can see all of the View options change. I can now change the icon size, grid spacing. I can have the labeled position to the right instead of on the bottom. I can even set a background color or picture for Icon View. This is only for Icon View but it certainly can create a different look for a folder. 
Now I should also mention you can customize Folder and File Icons. It is not something I would consider to be an easy change but if I don't talk about it here people will mention it in the Comments. So all you need is some sort of graphic that you want to use as a folder. You want to open that up in an Image App like Preview here so you can do Command A to select All and Command C to copy the graphic inside the file, not the file itself. Then  simply select something like a Folder here, do Command I to get Info, Select the folder Icon, like that, and Command V to Paste. You can see it reflected there in the Finder. 
To get rid of it just select the Icon again in the Info window and press the Delete key.
Here's another super easy change because it is just a setting and I think it creates a really dramatically different look for your Mac. Go into System Settings and then go to Accessibility. Go to Display and then look for Increase Contrast. It changes how things look. It has more defined borders. The Menu Bar and Windows aren't see through anymore so they don't get tinted by the colors behind it. I think it creates a pretty cool look that a lot of people really like. A little Retro. 
Now here's a bonus one that doesn't affect your entire Mac, just one app, Safari. A lot of us spend a lot of time in Safari. When we create a new window or new tab we often end up looking at the Start Page, like this. There's an Edit button at the bottom right corner of the Start Page and not only can you change what appears on the Start Page but you can add a background image. It may be that you see this background image more than you see the wallpaper. So turn that On and then you can click on the Plus button here and select your own background image. So I'll go and select one of my images here. Choose. Now I'll see this as kind of a wallpaper for Safari. 
So there are a bunch of quick and easy ways to customize how your Mac looks. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Easy Ways To Customize Your Mac”

Jim Terrinoni

1 month ago

Good job. Fun & easy.

Roy Whelden

Thanks. This is very interesting.
I hope this is on topic. I've downloaded one of Apple's screen savers, which turned out to be an enormous file. I'd like to delete it now. Do you know how I can do that?

Brian A. Foster

While novices will appreciate your easy tips to change the appearance of their Macs, we old-timers recognize that most of these changes date back to the 1980-90s. Back then, there was a big market for utilities, whether freeware, shareware, or commercial software (or just ResEdit) that let us truly customize almost every aspect of our Macs. Apple even relented in the 1990s by giving us official themes. In the 2000s, we could customize OS X with dozens of utilities that worked only with PowerPCs.

Gary Rosenzweig

Roy: There's no simply way to delete it without going into your system's library files. But if you aren't using it and your Mac needs the disk space later on, it should offload it at some point.

Sheldon

Thanks bunches

Andrew F.

4 weeks ago

Love your videos, Gary!

One question though. As shown with alert sounds, is there a similar folder for ringtones in FaceTime?

Andrew: No, there's nothing like that for FaceTime.

Gene Cyprych

2 weeks ago

I was not aware of a "Pictures" folder except that the ones I created. Where is the folder to which you refer?

Gene: The Pictures folder is one of the ones there by default in your user account Home folder. In Finder, choose Go > Home.

10 Easy Ways To Customize Your Mac

Comments: 9 Responses to “10 Easy Ways To Customize Your Mac”

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