I decided to make a dark background Beamer template and theme of my own. The default set of templates tend to make all beamer presentations look pretty much similar. And I think that the default dark ones just look awful.

Dark theme for Beamer

Beamer is a LaTeX class for creating presentation slides. It is much faster than PowerPoint or Keynote as it is typeset entirely in LaTeX. Also, you can write beautiful equations which is pretty useful if you do science! Beamer comes with quite a few themes and templates to change the look from a plain looking pdf document to something more like a presentation [see: beamer theme matrix].

This default template-set, tends to make all beamer presentations look pretty much the same. Add to that, most dark background themes in the matrix look awful! So, I cooked up a template and theme of my own. Following tradition, Beamer layout templates and themes get named after cities and animals respectively.

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in presentation mode

in handout mode

The layout theme, called Kalgan, displays the presentation outline on the left, slide numbers in the bottom right corner and also gets rid of the default useless navigation icons. (I have no idea why these exist in the first place! They never seem to work correctly...)

The colour theme, Mule, takes care of all the colours obviously. In the (default) presentation mode it has a dark gradient background with light text on it. To print handouts/notes just switch to handout mode in the TeX-file of the presentation by changing the documentclass as:
\documentclass[handout]{beamer}
and Mule then changes all the colours to make them suitable for print.

The dark background colour might interfere with some graphics that might need a lighter background (think line plots). For such situations, Mule defines a new command
\bgbox{}
which places a light coloured background behind the LaTeX in the braces.

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Get the source files for the template at the GitHub repository [link]. Feel free to use these in your presentations, I know I like darker themes!