Often universities provide official LaTeX templates for PhD theses. If your university doesn’t, here is a template. The template includes the most common elements of a thesis title page:
- University’s or institute’s logo
- Thesis title
- Author’s name
- Degree the thesis is submitted for
- Submission date
\documentclass[12pt, oneside]{book}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
%titlepage
\thispagestyle{empty}
\begin{center}
\begin{minipage}{0.75\linewidth}
\centering
%University logo
%\includegraphics[width=0.3\linewidth]{logo.pdf}
\rule{0.4\linewidth}{0.15\linewidth}\par
\vspace{3cm}
%Thesis title
{\uppercase{\Large the title of my thesis project which may span multiple lines\par}}
\vspace{3cm}
%Author's name
{\Large Author Name\par}
\vspace{3cm}
%Degree
{\Large A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy\par}
\vspace{3cm}
%Date
{\Large May 2014}
\end{minipage}
\end{center}
\clearpage
\end{document}
A few remarks
The template may have to be adapted, as it most likely won’t fulfil your university’s or institute’s official thesis guidelines.
If the official guidelines do not explicitly state it, do not use more than two different font sizes. In the template, I used the same font size throughout the title page (\Large).
To center content of the title page and still use twoside-margins for the thesis, use the geometry package:
\documentclass[12pt, oneside]{book}
\usepackage{geometry}
\begin{document}
% Oneside titlepage
\newgeometry{twoside}
% Twoside thesis content
\end{document}