wildcat

A beamer theme for Northwestern University

View the Project on GitHub aarondwolf/wildcat

wildcat

A modern, highly customizable Beamer theme.

Overview

This Beamer theme uses branding guidelines (colors, fonts, and logos) from Northwestern University. The design mimics Northwestern’s facets Zoom backgrounds, and the style files build on the amazing Stack Exchange answer by Claudio Fiandrino. This is not an official Northwestern-approved Beamer template.

Quick Start

The easiest way to get started is to download presentation.zip and unzip it. It contains all the .sty files, the free Poppins and IBM Plex Sans fonts, and a main.tex starter file ready to compile with XeLaTeX.

Alternatively, place all .sty files in the same directory as your .tex file and add to your preamble:

\usetheme{wildcat}

Requires XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX — PDFLaTeX will fail due to fontspec.

See source/wildcat-demo.pdf for a full reference of all features, or open the Overleaf template to get started immediately.

Theme Options

All options can be combined in a single line:

\usetheme[pattern=triangle, color=nudarkblue, font=poppins]{wildcat}

Background Patterns (pattern=)

12 built-in patterns ship with the theme:

Option Description
facet (default) NU facet design
facetrand NU facets (alternate arrangement)
triangle Triangle mosaic
triangleiso Isometric triangles
trianglemesh Wireframe mesh
squares Square grid
circles Circles
hexraise Raised hex clusters
hexrand Random hex shading
network Network/graph grid
quilt Quilt rings
plain Solid color fill

See source/wildcat-gallery.pdf for a visual preview of all patterns.

Colors (color=)

Pass any named color to change the primary theme color. All lighter and darker shades are generated automatically:

\usetheme[color=nudarkblue]{wildcat}

All nu* palette colors (nupurple, nudarkblue, nubrightgreen, etc.) are available. Standard xcolor names (red, blue, etc.) also work. For precise per-shade control, redefine individual wcprimary10–wcprimary40 and wcprimary110–wcprimary140 colors after \usetheme.

Fonts (font=)

Option Fonts Files needed
(default) Fira Sans None — works on Overleaf, MiKTeX, TeX Live
poppins Poppins + IBM Plex Sans TTF files in fonts/ (free from Google Fonts)
nu Campton + Akkurat Pro OTF files in fonts/ (Northwestern brand fonts)
installed Campton + Akkurat Pro Must be installed as system fonts

The default (Fira Sans) requires no setup — it is pre-installed on Overleaf and auto-installs on MiKTeX. For TeX Live, run tlmgr install fira if not found.

Custom Background Patterns

You can load a custom background pattern from a .tex file in your preamble after \usetheme:

\usetheme{wildcat}
\input{bg-gallery/bg-voronoi}   % use \input, not \include

The source/bg-gallery/ folder contains:

Want to contribute a pattern? Copy bg-template.tex, add your TikZ drawing commands, and open a pull request at github.com/aarondwolf/wildcat. Community patterns are welcome!

Overleaf

Users on Overleaf can use the Overleaf template to get started quickly.