How to dress up your Mac–Changing Icons (Basic)

Macintosh is awesome out of box, not just with elegant design, but also gorgeous system interface; it looks professional and neat. Here is the only icon for most of the people will see on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on their desktop after the first start-up:

To me, the graphic of this icon is very nice and I have been using the same one all the time just because I like it. Yet, is it the same situation for everyone else? I doubt it and the reason why I am writing this little tutorial is because I received a couple request on this topic. Some people, especially those who want to be more unique, would love to make their desktop look different, but the sad thing is that Apple doesn’t have a specific setting or application for users to do this change. In the following, I will guide you how to change the icon of your folders to make your desktop look different. Remember, dressing up your desktop is like putting a T-shirt on yourself; it’s a way to express your unique personality.

How to change the icon (Basic)

Part one I will show you steps that are very basic to get your icons change, if you would like to use your own icon, please keep reading the advanced part.

• Download icon

First of all, I would like to recommend you a couple of source to download icon set

• Pixelgirl
• deviantArt
• AppStorm
• The IconFactory
• InterfaceLift

In this website, you will find numerous terrific icons that is going to be eye-catching on your desktop, just choose one that you like and download it onto your computer. I chose “The Simpsons Icon” for I like it.You will usually get a “.zip” file and once you unzip it you should be able to see a bunch of icons in a set.

• Get icon info

Choose the icon you like, then right click it, choose “Get Info”:You should see something like this:

• Copy Icon to the folder you like:

I just created a folder called “icon to be replaced”, here is how it looks like before the icon was changed. Typical folder icon, right? Now let’s do the same thing to get this folder icon’s info (Right click the folder icon and choose “Get Info”):Let’s get back to the Simpson’s new folder icon info window, and click the icon thumbnail on the info windows, the icon will have a growing shadow if it’s been selected like this:Now you hit “command” and “C” at the same time to copy the icon and switch to new folder icon info folder, do the same thing, click the icon thumbnail so that it will have the growing shadowBut this time, you will hit “command” and “V” at the same time to past the icon to the new folder.

• Done

Alright, now you should probably see that your icon has already been changed. It’s as simple as that. You are not just able to change folders’ icon but also the many others including drives and applications except those are protected.

If you want something more advanced, please keep reading what I wrote here:

URL: How to dress up your Mac desktop (Advanced)