Dark Appearance

In this lesson for What’s New in macOS Mojave we look at the new Dark appearance we have with the Mac. In past macOS’s, you could only select the highlight color and not the overall appearance of your Mac. With macOS Mojave, Apple introduced the new Dark Appearance.

Enabling the Dark Appearance
To enable the dark appearance, you need to go to your System Preferences. From there select General. The first option you’ll see is Appearance with two options – Light and Dark.

Third party apps do not change to the darker appearance by default. The developer needs to design the app to use the dark appearance, so if you open an app that has not been updated to use the dark appearance, it will use the traditional light appearance.

Use Dark Background for Messages Option
When you are using the dark appearance, the entire Mac interface switches to a darker appearance including your Mail Messages. If you prefer to read and write your messages on the lighter background, you can enable this in Mail Preferences. Just open your Mail Preferences (under Mail in the menu bar when Mail is open). Then select the Viewing Tab. You’ll see an option for using the dark background for messages. Just deselect this to use the lighter background for reading and writing messages in Mail. This option only shows when you are using the dark appearance.

See this Lesson in Action
If you want to see this lesson in action, take a look at the video above.