LaTeX Beamer Debian Theme BOF

Specifying a corporate design for talks

BOF @ DebConf 7,Edinburgh, 21. June 2007

This BOF was intended to find a consensus about some kind of corporate design for talks using LaTeX Beamer. While this layout might be perfectly adaptable to Openoffice.Org Impress or other software that might be used for slides as well, the participants were just beamer users and interested in using this. Any other Input is welcome.

The slides for this talk are by no means intended to be reasonable examples for such a theme - they just stress certain points to discuss.

The following topic were discussed

Background and text colour

Basing on the idea that a light colour on a dark background might be easier to recognise in certain circumstances we decided for a dark blue background featuring light yellow text on it. The background should be mono coloured with a shade of a 3D swirl on it. The following image should give just an idea of the shape of the swirl - the colours of the image should not be used.

Example for swirl shape - the colours
     should not be used

Remark: Technically it might be very reasonable to design the swirl graphics as monochrome gray on transparent background. This makes sure that LaTeX beamer works correctly when colouring bullet symbols on the background if beamer has direct control over the background colour. Moreover this leaves some flexibility in case the swirl should be used on some other background.

Navigation menu and screen layout

There are two themes to develop: One for formal talks and one for informal talks. The idea behind this distinction which could also called technical or non-technical is that more technical talks often to require a fast navigation to specific slides so a certain navigation menu is needed. As the type of the menu something like the PaloAlto theme seems to be appropriate because it saves some space in the content area while being verbose enough to read always the title and author of the talk as well as sections and subsections to keep the auditorium informed about the process of the talk.

Example of PaloAlto theme to give an
     example how the menu should be placed.

The example above should only demonstrate the placement of the menu. There has to be found a clever way to separate the menu column from the context column - perhaps using some stylish vertical line or some slightly different background colour, because the content should be mono coloured dark blue as well.

The next example should only demonstrate the screen layout for the informal style without informative navigation menu. The Boadilla theme was used to produce this example which demonstrates the wished screen layout - but not the colours which are defined above.

Example of Boadilla theme to give an
     example for informal talks without menu.

Talking about Navigation symbols: By default the bottom right navigation symbols that LaTeX Beamer provides should be switched of (by \setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}) because they are not particular useful.

List bullets, code frames

The rounded bullets that LaTeX Beamer provides in itemize and enumerate lists are quite appealing and should be used. It would be a nice extension if there would be an additional symbol that could be used to explicitly stress an item - perhaps an arrow with similar rounded shapes or something like this. In any case such a thing would find some friends it has to be implemented in PGF as well as the bullets are done. This is necessary to work fully featured as bullets replacements.

LaTeX beamer provides the block environment. It sounds reasonable to find a background colour to the normal background and use these blocks for code snippets.

Additional logos

By default no additional logos should be used - the swirl in the background should be enough. This leaves some space for people who are talking on behalf of some other organisation to add something they might need.

Useful LaTeX macros

When holding Debian talks some things will e often repeated like mentioning URLs, references to package names or files. For these cases LaTeX macros are to be written to ensure a common layout for all occurances.