Theme Mac OS X with an Ultra-Minimalist & Clean Silver Appearance
Jul 3, 2012 - 7 Comments
Mac OS X doesn’t really have “themes” in the traditional sense, but you can create themes of sorts yourself by applying a few system tweaks. We’ve shown you how to do this before with a retro-inspired Classic Mac OS appearance and making OS X look like iOS, and now we’ll show you how to bring a nice looking modern minimalist greyscale appearance to OS X:
- Black Menu Bar: Get a dark OS X menu bar with the free MenuBarFilter tool.
- Graphite Buttons & UI Elements: Open System Preferences and click on “General”, then look for “Appearance” and set Graphite to change the window action buttons to silver. Under “Highlight color” pick Silver or a variation of grey.
- Greyscale Wallpaper: Pick a minimalist greyscale wallpaper, the screenshot uses “Light” from DizzyUP that we’ve covered before, but Subtle Patterns is a great collection too.
- Hide the Desktop Icons: To push the minimalist aspect, either disable the desktop icons through a Terminal command or with a menubar tool like DesktopUtility
- Auto-Hide the Dock: Hit Command+Shift+D to enable auto-hiding, and then make auto-hiding even better by removing the show & hide delay using the following defaults write command:
defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0 && killall Dock
With the menubar black and the graphite UI elements enabled, everything in the user interface gets a nice modern silver and greyscale appearance. It’s not a complete transformation but it looks very clean and matches the greyscale Finder sidebar icons quite well.
love the black toolbar thnx a million
Good article. Try MagicMenu to auto-hide the top menu.
http://www.cynosurex.com/Software/MagicMenu
Excelente tip, mi iMac se ve espectacular!!
Muchas gracias!
Nice article. You missed a great tip:
Right-click on the Finder window toolbar and select, “Customize Toolbar…”
Then you can remove a lot of the extra icons and even the search bar if you wish (which can still be accessed using CMD+F)
Looks good, love the black menu bar.
I did the black menu bar and it worked on all my other spaces but the first one. Any ideas why?
Here are all of the Subtle Patterns in high res, I use this with Graphite too.
http://hrbrt.me/subtle-papers-ii-for-the-retina-ipad