Changing the Accent Color Used in Apple Apps

Apps like Pages, Numbers and Notes use specific colors for selected items and highlights. This is called the Accent Color. You can override the accent colors in these apps with a system-wide accent color setting.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to change the accent color for the Apple Apps on your Mac. 
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So a common question I get is for an app like  Pages, how do you change that orange color that seems to be everywhere. Maybe in Numbers there's that green color. But most Apple apps have is called an Accent Color. 
So here I am in Pages. If I select the page here in the left sidebar you can see it is outlined in orange. If I select some text you can see that the highlight there has orange in it. In the right sidebar you're going to see orange used over and over again for different elements there. Here I am in Numbers and I can see green is everywhere. You can see green highlights the Sheet here. It's got the row and column. The border around the selected cell. In the right sidebar you see more green there as well. Keynote uses blue. You can see it here on the left. You can see it in the sidebar here. You can see it when you make a text selection. Other productivity apps do it as well. Here in Notes you're going to see yellow in a lot of places. Here in the Mail App it's seems like the highlight color is blue. 
A few other things to know about the Accent Color is that it is also the color of the blinking text cursor. So you can see it's blinking there and it is that orange for Pages. Also, these colors kind of match the icons. So if you look here in the Dock you can see Pages, the icon is that orange and in Numbers it's that green and Keynote is that blue. Even Notes has that yellow in the icon that matches the yellow accent color. 
So when I get people asking me how to change this color because, say, they don't like the orange in Pages they usually don't know what to call it. It is called the Accent Color. There's a Setting for it in System Settings. So go into System Settings and then in System Settings go to appearance. Right there near the top is Accent Color. So you're going to see the first item there shows you a little Color Wheel button and it's called MultiColor. Then the rest show you a variety of different colors you can choose. Now what MultiColor means is that each app can choose its own Accent Color. An app like Pages, Numbers, and Notes do, in fact, have special Accent Colors like the orange, green, and yellow of the those apps. A lot of other apps though use just blue, this first color here in this list, as their Accent Color. So it's the most common one you'll see. As a matter of fact the Settings app itself uses just blue. You can see it here in these buttons and switches and in what is selected on the left. 
Now by having your System Setting Accent Color set to MultiColor it's allowing each app to choose its default color. So most apps will choose blue but apps like Pages, Numbers, and Notes will choose their special color. Now you can override this for these apps by telling them that you don't want them to use their special color. Instead you want to use a uniform color across the system. So, for instance, I'm going to pick this purple color here. When I select it notice right away that the System Settings App now uses this purple color. You can see it throughout. Then if I go to Pages I can see purple used throughout it here. The same thing in Numbers. Numbers is now using that purple. Even Notes now is using purple. So if you don't like the orange of Pages or the yellow of Notes you can choose a System-wide Accent Color and force that color on those apps.
It's easy to change too so you don't have to pick one and then stick with it forever. You can change it to purple today and if tomorrow your mood says you want them to be orange you can switch to orange. If you don't like having the colors at all the gray or graphite choice here is a good one. 
Here you can see other apps it will obey that as well. Also here I've got that graphite color in Mail. See in Calendar I have it somewhat. A lot of the colors you see in Calendar are the result of which calendar is chosen. I've got my work calendar as red and my personal calendar as green. But at least the highlight here follows that gray. Some apps have a mix here. You can see here in the Music App I'm getting now graphite for the highlight color here. But notice the items in the left seem to be permanently red. You can't change those. Then some other apps don't follow it at all. For instance in Reminders here you're going to get colors that have to do with the color chosen for the list. So here I've got this purple. I've got this blue. I've got this red here. There's really not much of an opportunity to use the highlight colors. If I select the Today List or the Schedule List you can see it is using the specific colors having to do with those. Not really the Accent Color of the system. 
So there are limits as to how far the Accent Color will go. It will change a lot of things but not everything. Now note that when you choose an Accent Color, like this, there's also the Highlight Color underneath it. Now when you select it you notice that it changes to match. So I can change it to pink, red, purple, and this always changes. But I can decide to make that something different. So I can go in here and say I want purple to be the Accent Color but the Highlight Color to be orange. Now in Pages you can see I've got the purple Accent Color there. But a selection is made in orange. You can still see the purple Accent Color here in the right sidebar. You can also choose the Accent Color to follow the color for the app and the Highlight Color to be something specific. So I can make the Highlight Color blue but let the apps choose the Accent Color. So now Pages look like this. You can see the Accent Color here but selection is blue. 
Now, of course, these apps all exist on the iPhone and iPad as well. Unfortunately on those devices there is no Setting for Accent Color in the Settings App. Hopefully that is something that Apple will add one day as well as perhaps a setting where we can customize the Accent Color for each app individually. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: One Response to “Changing the Accent Color Used in Apple Apps”

Sheldon

9 months ago

Thanks bunches

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Changing the Accent Color Used in Apple Apps

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