“Ever since OS X Lion came out [there are] a couple of things that drive me nuts about its new Finder sidebar,” Jason D. O’Grady writes for ZDNet.
“For starters, Apple changed from color icons to the lifeless gray ones,” O’Grady writes. “If the gray is too drab for your taste, there’s an easy way to turn them back to color.”
O’Grady writes, “I really dislike the way Lion relegates the Devices area (where icons for hard drives, mounted servers, etc. appear) to the bottom of the Finder sidebar. In Snow Leopard (a.k.a. 10.6) Devices were at the top of the Finder sidebar and I’m just used to finding them there… If you suffer from phantom aliases which seemingly can’t be removed from Lion’s Finder sidebar, Hybridair at MacRumors Forums offers this fix which works like a charm…”
The full article contains instructions for changing the three things described above here.