Title blocks and title pages

A paper opens with a title block: title, authors, date, set at the top of the first page. A thesis opens with a full title page laid out to a university’s specification. LaTeX treats these as two different problems. The first is automated by \maketitle, and the second is a blank canvas called the titlepage environment.

The title block

\title{A Study of Examples}
\author{Ada Lovelace\\University of Something}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

The first three commands only store metadata; nothing appears in the PDF when they run, which is why they can sit in the preamble. \maketitle, placed after \begin{document}, is the moment the stored block is typeset. Inside \author, the \\ breaks a line, the usual way to put an affiliation under a name, and \and separates multiple authors so they are set side by side. \date{\today} prints the date of whichever day you compile; write \date{} with empty braces to omit the date line entirely, since leaving \date out altogether prints today’s date anyway.

In the article class the block sits at the top of page one with the text following below. In report and book it gets a page of its own. Journal and conference classes replace this machinery with their own commands for affiliations, emails, and ORCIDs, so inside a venue template you should follow its sample file rather than the standard commands.

A hand-built title page

\begin{titlepage}
 \centering
 \vspace*{2cm}
 {\Large Thesis Title\\[1em]}
 {\large Author Name\\}
 \vfill
 Submitted for the degree of ...\\
 \today
\end{titlepage}

The titlepage environment gives you one unnumbered page and full manual control, which is what thesis regulations usually demand. Each piece of the example earns its place. \centering centers everything that follows within the environment. \vspace*{2cm} pushes the title down from the top edge; the starred form matters because an unstarred \vspace at the top of a page is discarded. The braces around {\Large ...} scope the font size change so it ends where the group ends, and \\[1em] breaks the line with an extra em of space below it. \vfill inserts stretchable space that absorbs whatever height remains, which is how the degree statement and date land at the bottom of the page no matter how long the title is.

Use one mechanism or the other. Combining \maketitle with a titlepage environment produces two title pages, and the classic beginner miss is the quiet one: defining \title and \author but forgetting \maketitle, so the document compiles cleanly with no title at all. The document skeleton lesson shows where the block fits in the file as a whole.