macOS – How to Change Menu Bar Font

System preferences > General > Appearance > [Blue|Graphite]

Graphite will turn menu selection co lor to dark grey. Of course it's system wide so it also will change the color for other UI elements.

Modding

You will need :

• SArtFileTool
• image editor
• a good backup ;-)

Download SArtFileTool into ~/Downloads/SArtFile then copy and decompress the system art resource file :

cd ~/Downloads/SArtFile
cp /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/SArtFile.bin ./
./sartfiletool -d SArtFile.bin artfiles

Go into the artfiles directory and find 52.png 68.png 71.png files and modify them.

• 52.png = "Blue" top menu text selection color
• 68.png = "Blue" menu item text selection color
• 71.png = "Blue" help menu item "Search" background color

Then recreate SArtFile.bin and put into place :

./sartfiletool -e artfiles SArtFile.bin SArtFile.new.bin
sudo cp SArtFile.new.bin /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/SArtFile.bin

Logout & log in again, menu should look something like this (I cheated and used the turquoise-ish files from "Lion Pulse" mod.)

Additional remarks: The SArtFile is poorly documented for Lion, here's the explanation of the contents for Snow Leopard but Lion's is different. The selection in Finder is still the harsher blue, haven't looked into that yet.

Unfortunately, there's no setting to change the color of the menu bar itself.

LeoColorBar

As penguinrob suggests, you could set the menubar to translucent, and influence its color by changing the color of the part of the wallpaper underneath the menubar. LeoColorBar, pictured below, basically automates that for you.

Despite the fact that it hasn't been updated in a while, it's worked perfectly for me in Lion.

A black menu bar

Alternatively, there are applications like Nocturne that you can use to set your menu bar to dark gray.

MenuBarFilter is another application based on Nocturne that turns your menu bar black.

The latter two applications, however, didn't work very well for me in Lion (especially in full-screen mode), so your best bet would be to stick with LeoColorBar.