If you’re using Beamer to make slides, your slides have way too much extra crap on them. Built-in navigation buttons at the bottom left, multiple layers of header and footer bars, dots that count the slides within each section, etc.
People can just ignore that extra stuff, right? Wrong. Every change in color and pattern grabs people’s attention. Attention is scarce, and you want to conserve it and focus it on the things that people actually care about.
Your slides probably have a bunch of other problems as well. Maybe you’re using a 4:3 aspect ratio, or the normal dense \itemize environment that crowds text together too much. Maybe you’re stuck with an ugly color scheme or you have a million old commands in your preamble that you’re not actually using.
Indeed, your slides probably look like these:
The challenge with fixing this is that you have to make a ton of manual fixes to your Beamer preamble, which is a nightmare. That challenge is now solved, thanks to some elbow grease that I put in and the magic of generative AI (specifically Claude). You can download kerwin.sty here, and all you need to do to use it is upload it to your Overleaf project and then use the following lines:
\documentclass{beamer}
% Load custom style with desired color
%Change Magenta4 to whatever you want here
%Look up color options at \url{https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Colors}
\usepackage[color=Magenta4]{kerwin}
And here’s a clickable link to the color options for picking your font color: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Colors
Here are the results:
The only manual edit I made to the original .tex file for this slide was to use the \littlegray command that I adopted from Adrienne Lucas (with slight updates).
The .sty file also has Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham’s \wideitemize environment, which you can use instead of \itemize. And it incorporates an ʻokina character so you can properly write Hawaiʻi and other Hawaiian words. It was originally based on beamerthemeFrankfurt.sty by Till Tantau; feel free to edit it as long as you also share your version freely.
Comments or suggestions are also more than welcome!