Dark Theme for LaTeX beamer

The beamer LaTeX class comes with several predefined styles and color themes. It allows you to create presentation slides or transparencies, which are typeset the professional way you are used to from other LaTeX documents. The result documents are rendered as PDF files to be easily presented on most platforms and on other computers, which do not have the LaTeX development environment installed. If you are familiar with the document creation principles and maybe have your content already available as LaTeX sources, you will enjoy the easy way of creating beautiful presentations. However, the built-in styling and color options did not satisfy me. Hence, I developed a dark theme according to my requirements.

Features

Looking at the example slides below, apparently a background picture is used. It can be configured within the .sty file to meet your preference or you comment out the line to simply use a black background. Beside the title page – being very plain and using the standard metadata such as title, subtitle, author, institute and date – the frames have a footline, which is divided into three parts. The left part contains the author's name. The middle part contains the presentation's title. The right part shows the date as well as the current and total page numbers. For author, title and date, you can provide additional short forms in square brackets, in case you run into space problems. Actual content is organized in exampleblocks, which you can fill with your text, figures or lists. Tints are aligned to one accent color, which is also a subject to configuration in the .sty file. Find a nice light blue in the comments or try out your own accent color.

Preview of example slides using the theme.
Preview of example slides using the s4ndm4n dark theme.

Conclusion

I have been using LaTeX beamer for years successfully in scientific and other presentations. This theme hopefully keeps up with the time and will be improved further according to my conditions. I am aware, that not all structuring elements – such as other block types – usually available are compatible to the style and color adjustments. The .sty file and an example PDF document are offered as downloads below. Have a look into the source code and use it as an inspiration for your own themes. What are your experiences on customizing LaTeX beamer themes?

[Update December 2017]: An improved package has been published on GitHub. See downloads below.

Downloads