Customizing Your Mac With Icon & Widget Styles

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the new ability in macOS Tahoe to color theme the icons in macOS.

So macOS Tahoe, of course, has a whole new look that Apple calls Liquid Glass. But on top of that you can now actually color theme the icons on your Mac. You're not stuck with exactly how the icons look or having to meticulously create and customize each individual icon. You can now just apply a color theme across all of them and some other interface elements as well. For instance, here I am just looking at my Desktop. I've got some widgets here on the left. I've got some icons here on my Desktop, including my Drive, a couple of aliases to some apps that I've added, a folder, and a file. At the bottom, of course, I have the Dock showing my most frequently used apps. Now in general this is how everybody's Mac would look. Now you've got the ability to apply some transparency and color to all of the icons in the Dock and some other elements as well. 

To do this go into System Settings and then you want to select Appearance. What's new is this Icon and Widget Styles Section. Here you've got four choices as to how you want your icons to look. Now the first option here, Default, is what we had before. If you don't like any of these theming options just stick with Default. The app icons in the Dock and elsewhere will look exactly as the developer intended and nothing will really change for you. If color theming isn't for you then just stick with it. 

But let's move on to the second option, which is Dark. If we switch to that you'll notice all of these icons change. You see now in the Dock most of them have a dark background. The same things happen to the three app icons here on my Desktop. So think of it like this. Each icon has kind of two layers. A foreground and a background. When you choose Dark the foreground stays the same but the background will turn monochrome and loose all of its color saturation and then goes to a very dark color. It's  different than Default. Default isn't just light. It actually shows all the colors. So, for instance, look carefully here at the Maps icon and the Photos Icon. So the foreground of the Maps icon is that blue line and the arrow. The foreground of the Photos icon is the kind of color wheel there. If I switch from Dark to Default you can see the background of the Maps icon is actually colorful. There's green, yellow, and a light red there. The background of the Photos icon was just white. So when I switch to Dark you'll see the Photos icon just as a dark solid color, like now it is a white color, but the Maps icon desaturates and gets Dark, looses all the color there, but the foreground stays the same. 

So, in a way, the Default in Dark settings are kind of a matched pair. They both are the two settings that will show you color in icons. Just the Dark version shows you less color, but there is still color there. So if you like the differentiate your icons using color and you find that's important, then these are probably the two options you want to stick to. You do have the option here if you select Dark that instead of choose Always, choose Auto. What happens here is it will obey the Appearance Setting. Auto, Light, or Dark. So right now I have it set to just always be Light. But if I change to Dark mode then my whole interface switches to Dark including the icon. If I switch to Auto here then I get Light mode during the day, Dark mode at night and the icons will follow suit. 

Now let's move on to the third option here which is Clear. So this is where the Liquid Glass comes in. Instead of the icons being opaque they're going to be Clear and you are going to see some of the background through them. So let's select this one here and you'll see now they all change and sure enough they show some of the background behind. But Clear has a second mode. That's Dark. You have Clear Light and Clear Dark. If we switch to Dark they are still transparent but now the background is a much darker color and the foreground is much lighter. So look closely there at Maps and Photos. Look at Dark and then Light. 

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So you see these three icons here on the Desktop and you see all the icons here in the Dock. They all kind of have a bluish tint right now. But that's just because the Desktop wallpaper is that color. Let's go to Wallpaper here and switch to something else. I'm going to switch to this old Sequoia wallpaper and notice how now the icons pick up the color there. As a matter of fact the Sequoia wallpaper has different colors on the left and right here along the bottom. So you can clearly see how the icons are just transparent. They really don't have a color. They are just showing the color through them. Notice here the icons for the aliases on the Desktop, they kind of don't really show as much transparency or maybe no transparency at all. Also notice the widgets here on the left show the colors through as well. You can see that pretty clearly here in the clock. Watch what happens when I switch back to the Tahoe default wallpaper. You can see it's showing that color through. If I go back to Appearance here look at the widgets here and then see how they look here when it's Clear and set to Light. Then I can switch from Clear Light to Clear Dark and you can notice how the widgets change there. Also these app icons here in the Desktop. Notice now if I just go to Dark you get the same effect here but it is different than Default. So the Default widget and the Dark widget are the same as the Clear Light and Clear Dark. 

Now let's take a detour here for a second and talk about Folder Color. So Folder Color allows you to choose either Automatic or Variety of colors that match the standard label colors that have been around in macOS for a long time. Also a Choose Color option. This will be the same here whether you choose Clear, Dark, or Default. If I were to change from Automatic notice that the folder color here, this one folder I've got on the Desktop, will change to match it. So you can see it changes to red and also the folder in the Dock, the Downloads folder in this case, that changes as well. So I can change this Default folder color from that pale blue that's always been around to one of these other options. I can even choose Color and then use this slider here to choose the color I want. So I'll choose this. Then I can use this second slider to choose saturation. So this is highly saturated so the colors used a lot whereas when I go all the way down here the colors used a lot less so it's just this darker version of it. So you could kind of pick which one you want by sliding this back and forth. You can also choose from a Color Picker. So here now you're choosing something that you see on your screen. What you typically may want to do is choose something that is in the wallpaper, so it picks up a color from the wallpaper like that and it will set the sliders to that. Let's choose something else. Something lighter, like this. It will set the sliders to that as well. Then you can also click here to use the Theme Color to go back to Automatic, like that. 

So now that you've seen how to customize the Folders separate from the Default Dark or Clear Settings, we're going to go to Tinted. In Tinted we have a color choice to make. We can choose the color of the tinting for all the icons. Notice here you get this blue tinting here in these and in the Dock as well. You have Light and Dark versions of those. But also notice here that the folder color now changes to Icon Widget & Folder Color. So this color choice is going to not just affect folders but everything else as well.  So if I choose red here not only do the folders change to red as before but now you can see the icons in the Dock on the Desktop and even the widgets here, they all change to that color as well. Notice also the color of the icons in System Settings change. This only happens when there is a solid icon, like this. When it is a symbol like in the Finder you won't see any change. So you can pick the color here, go between the Dark version and the Light versions of those colors with this setting here. Auto, just like with Clear will then go with the general appearance, either Auto, Light, or Dark mode for your whole display. In addition to being able to choose from the Standard colors here, like that, you can also go to Choose Color, like before, and choose something either by moving these sliders around, like that, and more or less saturation in the color, or you can use the Color Picker and pick something from the interface, like that, which works to kind of match the colors of the icons with the colors of the wallpaper. 

So, let's look at that further. Let's say that instead of using the standard dynamic wallpaper you want to use one of your own photos as wallpaper. So I'll go to Wallpaper here and then I will select Your Photos, Add Photos. I'm going to choose from Photos here, I can also choose a file if I wish, and then find a photo here in my library that I think will make a nice Desktop background. Let's choose this one here. Now I can pick a color from it and use that for the interface. So, let's go back to Appearance. I've got Tinted selected. Let's use Light to begin with and I'm going to use to Choose Color here and I'm going to use the Color Picker Let's try picking out this tan color right here and see how that looks. You can see that comes out a bit orange. Let's try it again. Let's try picking, maybe, one of the blues from the sky, like that and see how that works. I like that a lot better. But we can also pick out something else. Like maybe this red from these little mushroom objects here and have the color coordinated with that. 

Let's try another photo here from My Photos App. You can see I've got like a beach scene. Let's go and try to match a color with that that we think will look good. We'll use Choose Color here. Click the Color Picker. We can try to get some of the sand color here and see how that looks. I think it is too orange. But you know what we can adjust the saturation in there and make it darker. That looks a lot better. 

Here's another beach scene and you can see here it's got some nice turquoise water in here. So let's try to pickup on that by choosing that color using the Color Picker. Like right here. Maybe I can make it, let's make it a little bit darker, like that. Then I can see how that looks right here to match my whole theme. 

Another thing you can do in Wallpaper is choose just a solid color here. So let's say you like purple. You can just choose a purple background like that and then go back to Appearance here and then use Tinted but you can choose the purple color there, like that, try out the Light version, try out the Dark version and maybe if that's not quite right you can go to Choose Color here and you can try different shades, like that.

Now if you are Theming like that, matching the wallpaper with the Icon & Widget Style then you probably also want to go into the color themes here. Instead of using Multi-color, which lets each app choose its own thing, you can choose a color from here and this will change how the Highlights work like this and also the Text Highlights as well. You can have it go with the color like that. So you can see I can select the text here and that's like a purple highlight. 

But also take note at how easy it is to Undo all of this. Like if I'm just playing around with this and I decide, well time to get to work let me change everything back, I can change back to Multicolor here, change back to Automatic here. Go to Default here and Automatic here. Now everything is back as it was before. I can even just go quickly back into Wallpaper here and go back to the Default Tahoe Wallpaper. So it is not that hard to make changes and Undo them. It's not that hard to experiment. Some people may find that they want to work with it and figure out what they want macOS to look like for them. Others may decide that they want to change it every week or every month or even every day just to have a fresh looking work environment. 

It's really just a personal choice which is why Apple keeps referring to this as Personalization. So whether you decide to use this or not I hope at least this video lets you know what is possible. Thanks for watching.