How to make LaTeX Beamer prettier

Having held a number of presentations at free software conferences and training events over the years, I have played with a bunch of presentation tools and keep coming back to LaTeX Beamer as the least of many evils, just as many others who go to these sorts of events appear to have done. Like most Beamer users, it appears, I had stuck with the default theme: Warsaw, blue. It's almost a trademark of Beamer by now.

Occasionally, however, I get somewhat jealous of the look created by Powerpoint, Impress, Keynote, or some other more evil tool. So finally I have collected some tips on how to make Beamer presentations less ordinary, but not silly, just better looking. Actually, the Beamer manual contains much of this information as well, so you can check that for the details, but the Beamer manual seems more targeted toward writing a mathematics lecture, not a technical presentation for an IT conference. So here it goes:

• Create your own color theme. The standard blue is boring. Your company or organization probably has brand colors; use those. Normally, they are designed to look good together. (But if your primary color is supposed to be some shade of red, be careful. Sometimes, red slides look quite bad.) If you really don't have a color scheme, google for "color scheme creator" and make one.
• When you implement your color theme, be sure to also set the colors for alerts and blocks, and anything else you might use. These are good places to apply secondary colors that your company's brand guidelines might supply.
• Use a different style theme. Unless you are writing a semester-length lecture series (which you are probably not, if you are reading this), avoid all the themes that have always-on table of contents, progress bar, and other distracting stuff. Most of the themes don't look very good, in my opinion, but that is partially because of the funny colors. So the advice is, change the colors and theme in unison. It's not that hard; it took me a day to figure out by trial and error. Once you are done with this, save this as your or your organization's presentation template for the future.
• Use \beamertemplatenavigationsymbolsempty to remove the navigation symbols from the PDF. No one needs them, they look weird, and they kind of reveal that you are using Beamer. Put that command in your theme file.
• Change the font. Well, if you are going to a conference full of Windows users and want to show off your geek tool, leave the font. On the other hand, if you want your presentation to look more like Windows, that is, PowerPoint, use the Helvetica font. There are also other good fonts available that are neither Linux nor Windows biased. Also change the fonts for the verbatim environments. The same really goes for anything produced with LaTeX. Change the fonts. The defaults are from the 80s.
• I strongly recommend the "upquote" package, which makes sure that an apostrophe in a verbatim environment (where you put your code samples) is upright like the ASCII apostrophe, not curly like a quotation mark. Besides looking better and more correct, this has the very practical benefit that copying and pasting code out of your PDF slides actually works correctly. You just have to include that package and everything works.
• I advise against the "listings" package, especially for SQL code. It does not know nearly all the key words, it uses funny fonts, and looks pretty ugly. If some could fix that, I would be mildly interested. For other languages, for example Python, the results are much better, if you change the fonts and colors. Results may vary. But for SQL, the verbatim environment and a modern typewriter font work much better.
• For diagrams, schemas, charts, and graphics of that sort, I recommend the "tikz" package. This was my key discovery of late. In the past, creating a flow chart or a deployment diagram meant using something like Dia or OpenOffice.org to construct the image (a painful experience in itself), then exporting that file in various formats until you find one that LaTeX can accept without butchering the image, and then scaling the image to fit on the page. And then if it doesn't look good or you want to change something, you repeat the cycle. With tikz, you issue drawing commands in TeX. Sounds scary, is scary, but it's not that hard. With the excellent documentation and tutorial, you can get the hang of it in a few days. This approach has awesome advantages: The graphics use the same fonts and colors as the rest of your document (the fonts and colors you customized, remember?). When you change the font family or size or a color, your graphics follow suit! All the graphics and fonts scale without problems. And everything is in one file; you don't have to worry about exporting and importing anymore. And you can use version control and diff and make and so on. And if the graphics have a repetitive nature and you are slightly daring, you can even program your graphics in TeX, with loops and automatic layout and all that.
  

That's it. Compare my SQL/MED presentations before and after I applied these tips. It's actually not so difficult once you figure out the right magic, as is typically the case with TeX things.