LaTeX Beamer templates

If you build presentations with LaTeX Beamer — or want to — these are two branded themes I made so a deck comes out looking like UC Davis or California Education Lab slides without hand-tuning colors and fonts. One is an unofficial UC Davis theme I built; the other is a Beamer port of the lab's official CEL PowerPoint template, so a LaTeX deck can match the lab's standard slide look — handy if you'd rather write slides in LaTeX than PowerPoint (e.g. building a talk straight from a paper). Both live in chesun/latex_templates.

Unofficial

These are unofficial and not affiliated with or endorsed by UC Davis; the CEL theme is a LaTeX port of the lab's own PowerPoint template.

What they look like

UC Davis theme (XeLaTeX / pdfLaTeX variants) — click for the full sample deck.

California Education Lab theme, a port of the official CEL PowerPoint template — click for the full sample deck.

The three themes

Theme	Brand	Engine	Font	Load with
UC Davis (XeLaTeX)	UC Davis	XeLaTeX / LuaLaTeX	Helvetica Neue (fontspec)	\usetheme{ucdavis}
UC Davis (pdfLaTeX)	UC Davis	pdfLaTeX	Helvetica (helvet)	\usetheme{ucdavis}
California Education Lab	CEL	pdfLaTeX	Carlito (free Calibri clone)	\usetheme{caedlab}

The two UC Davis rows are the same theme — pick the one that matches your compiler; they differ only in font setup. The CEL theme renders at 4:3 and 16:9 from the same source (just change the aspectratio option) and adds a table of contents and automatic section-divider slides.

Quickstart on Overleaf (the easy path)

Overleaf is the least-fuss way to use these — you import one file by URL and you're done. From the repo README:

1. New File → From External URL, and paste the raw .sty URL for your theme:
   • UC Davis (XeLaTeX): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chesun/latex_templates/release/dist/ucdavis-xelatex/beamerthemeucdavis.sty
   • UC Davis (pdfLaTeX): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chesun/latex_templates/release/dist/ucdavis-pdflatex/beamerthemeucdavis.sty
   • California Education Lab: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chesun/latex_templates/release/dist/caedlab/beamerthemecaedlab.sty
2. CEL only — import the logo the same way (the theme expects cel_logo.png at the project root):
   • https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chesun/latex_templates/release/dist/caedlab/cel_logo.png
3. In your preamble, add \usetheme{ucdavis} or \usetheme{caedlab}.
4. Set the compiler in Menu → Compiler — XeLaTeX for the UC Davis XeLaTeX theme, pdfLaTeX for the other two.

To pull later improvements, click the imported file and hit Refresh. To freeze a deck so it can't shift under you (e.g. slides for a submitted paper), swap release in the URL for a version tag like v1 — a permanent snapshot that Refresh won't move.

CEL theme specifics

• 4:3 or 16:9 from one source: \documentclass[aspectratio=43]{beamer} (CEL native) or aspectratio=169 (widescreen); the layout adapts automatically.
• Logo is placed on the title slide for you — no per-deck path edits.
• Funding note: set it with \renewcommand{\acknowledgement}{...}; it defaults to the official CEL placeholder text.

Compiling locally, and the full guide

If you compile locally instead of on Overleaf — or you want the split-file setup, how updates get published, or how to pin a frozen version — the repo README covers all of it. The short version: drop the same bundled .sty (plus cel_logo.png for CEL) next to your .tex, add \usetheme{...}, and compile with xelatex or pdflatex — run it twice if your deck has a table of contents.