Designing Your Desktop In some ways, just buying a Macintosh is a renegade act of self-expression. But that's only the beginning. | . Designing Your Desktop In some ways just buying a Macintosh is a renegade act of self-expression. But that s only the beginning. Now it s time to fashion the computer screen itself according to your personal sense of design and fashion. . System Preferences Cosmetically speaking Mac OS X offers two dramatic full-screen features desktop backgrounds and screen savers. The command center for both of these functions is the System Preferences program which longtime Mac and Windows fans may recognize as the former Control Panels . Open it by clicking the System Preferences icon in the Dock if it s there or by choosing its name from the menu. When the System Preferences program opens you can choose a desktop picture or screen saver by clicking the Desktop Screen Saver button. For further details on these System Preferences panes see Section . . Graphic Designers Corner The Gray Look One of the earliest objections to the lively brightly colored look of Mac OS X came from Apple s core constituency artists and graphic designers. Some complained that Mac OS X s bright blues of scroll bar handles progress bars the menu pulsing OK buttons highlighted menu names and commands along with the red green and yellow windowcorner buttons threw off their color judgment. These features have been greatly toned down since the original version of pulsing effects are subtler the three-dimensional effects are less drastic and the button colors are less intense. It s all part of Mac OS X s gradual de-colorization in Leopard both the menu and the Spotlight menu have gone from colorful to black. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION Desktop Fonts How do I change the fonts used by the Mac OS X Finder In Mac OS versions gone by you could choose any font you liked for your icon labels. You even had a choice of fonts for use in your menus. Nowadays that flexibility is gone. You get Lucida Grande in your menus and as icon labels love it or leave it. You can change the type size in
