Modern Slide Design in LaTeX: Gradients, Glass and Restraint

Everything the current slide aesthetic is made of, soft gradients, frosted panels, full-bleed imagery, is available in TikZ, and almost every deck that uses all three would be better using one. The code is below. The restraint is the harder part and matters more.

A gradient that reads as depth, not as decoration

The rule that separates the two is distance in hue. Shade between two tones of the same colour and you get depth. Shade between purple and orange and you get a slide nobody can read text on:

\usepackage{tikz}
% Bilinear shading lives in this library. Without it the four corner keys are
% unknown and the build dies on the first slide.
\usetikzlibrary{shadings}
\definecolor{deep}{HTML}{1B2A4A}
\definecolor{shallow}{HTML}{2A5CAA}

\setbeamertemplate{background}{%
  \begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
    \shade[upper left=deep, upper right=deep,
           lower left=shallow, lower right=shallow]
      (current page.south west) rectangle (current page.north east);
  \end{tikzpicture}}

The frosted panel, honestly

Real glassmorphism blurs whatever sits behind the panel. PDF has no runtime blur, so that is not available and anyone claiming otherwise is showing you a pre-blurred image. What does work, and reads identically at slide size, is a rounded rectangle at partial opacity with a hairline border:

\newcommand{\glass}[1]{%
  \begin{tikzpicture}
    \node[rounded corners=6pt,
          fill=white, fill opacity=0.10,
          draw=white, draw opacity=0.28, line width=0.4pt,
          inner sep=12pt, text opacity=1, text=white,
          text width=0.8\textwidth] {#1};
  \end{tikzpicture}}

Two details do the work. text opacity=1 keeps the words solid while the panel stays translucent, which is the mistake most people make first. And the border sits at lower opacity than the fill, because a hard white outline is what makes a panel look pasted on.

Full bleed, without losing the text

\begin{frame}[plain]
  \begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture,overlay]
    \node at (current page.center)
      {\includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight]{cover}};
    % Scrim: without it, light parts of the photo eat the title.
    \fill[black, opacity=0.45]
      (current page.south west) rectangle (current page.north east);
    \node[white, font=\Huge\bfseries] at (current page.center) {Results};
  \end{tikzpicture}
\end{frame}

The scrim is not optional. A photograph with a bright region will swallow white text exactly where the title sits, and you will not notice on your laptop in a dark room, which is never where the talk happens.

The restraint

Three rules that matter more than any of the code above. Use the treatment on the title, the section breaks and the closing slide, and leave the content plain: contrast is what makes a decorated slide feel deliberate. Keep one accent colour and one typeface family, because a deck with three accents reads as a template someone downloaded. And test it projected, or at least at arm's length on a phone, since everything subtle enough to look sophisticated on a laptop disappears through a beamer in a bright room.

Where this goes next

The mechanics of removing the dated Beamer furniture are in building a pitch deck that does not look like Beamer, the structure for a talk is in conference talk slides, and the presentation templates include decks built with these techniques if you would rather start from one.