The new iCal is hideous beyond belief.  The idea to put faux leather in the UI leads to one of the most grotesque design choices by Apple I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Thankfully this is easily fixable!  You can modify the files responsible for this ghastly outrage within the Application package itself, leading to an interface that is less likely to cause you to gouge out your eyes.  The files in question are LeatherTile.png, LeatherTileFullscreen.png and CanvasTopTile.png, found in /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources – which you can replace with the files attached to this post.

I’ve basically modified these images to more closely resemble the iCal icon, of course you can change these to whatever you want!

 

UPDATE : Included a theme to more closely mimic the silver iCal of Snow Leopard

Download iCal_fugly_fix.zip or iCal_fugly_fix_silver.zip depending on preference

Quit iCal if you have it open

Navigate to your Applications folder, Right click on iCal icon and select ‘Show Package Contents’

Navigate through to Contents -> Resources

(If you want to take a backup of the original ugly version take a backup of the ‘Resources’ folder first!)

Copy the files from the zip archive you just downloaded to this location.  You’ll be prompted to replace the existing files, and enter your password.

 

That’s it!  Fire up iCal.  If I find time I’ll modify the buttons up top to better suit the Red theme, too.