How to customize \titlepage in beamer?

Question

I'm trying build my own theme to use for work-related presentations in beamer. I'm not so familiar with how to write the themes, I'm customizing a title page manually at the moment.

What I want to do is have fine control over where text goes on the page when the \titlepage command is issued. I want to shift it rightwards and downwards from where beamer is choosing to put it.

Answer 1

You could use \defbeamertemplate to define your own title page template. There you may use the commands \inserttitle, \insertauthor, \insertdate etc. to insert those values, also don't forget to use the predefined font and color values.

Here is a compilable example. Of course you can use \centering, \vfill, beamercolorbox etc. but I keep it simple for the purpose of demonstration.

\documentclass{beamer}
\defbeamertemplate*{title page}{customized}[1][]
{
  \usebeamerfont{title}\inserttitle\par
  \usebeamerfont{subtitle}\usebeamercolor[fg]{subtitle}\insertsubtitle\par
  \bigskip
  \usebeamerfont{author}\insertauthor\par
  \usebeamerfont{institute}\insertinstitute\par
  \usebeamerfont{date}\insertdate\par
  \usebeamercolor[fg]{titlegraphic}\inserttitlegraphic
}
\title{A customized title page}
\subtitle{for demonstration}
\author{Stefan Kottwitz}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

Answer 2

Since beamer version 3.70, the title page is structured much more modularly. Instead of one monolithic code block, it now consists of several smaller templates. This means you can do a lot of tweaks just by changing or modifying these templates.

Examples:

• to add the name of a supervisor below the author, you can use

  \addtobeamertemplate{author}{}{Supervisor\par}
  

• to change the spacing above the date:

  \addtobeamertemplate{date}{\vskip1cm}{}
  

• to change the order in which the various fields are shown on the title page:

  \setbeamertemplate{title page}{
    \vbox{}
    \vfill
    \begingroup
      \centering
      \usebeamertemplate{title}
      \vskip0.5em
      \usebeamertemplate{titlegraphic}
      \vskip1em
      \usebeamertemplate{author}
      \usebeamertemplate{institute}
      \usebeamertemplate{date}
    \endgroup
    \vfill
  }
  

---

\documentclass{beamer}
\title{Title}
\author{Author}
\institute{Institute}
\titlegraphic{\includegraphics[width=3cm]{example-image-duck}}
\setbeamertemplate{title page}{
  \vbox{}
  \vfill
  \begingroup
    \centering
    \usebeamertemplate{title}
    \vskip0.5em
    \usebeamertemplate{titlegraphic}
    \vskip1em
    \usebeamertemplate{author}
    \usebeamertemplate{institute}
    \usebeamertemplate{date}
  \endgroup
  \vfill
}
\addtobeamertemplate{author}{}{Supervisor\par}
\addtobeamertemplate{date}{\vskip1cm}{}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}
\end{document}