I would also like to encourage you to have a look at ConTeXt. It goes the other way for LaTeX and wants to think you about layout more. I use it to create all my slides and have far more fun than with LaTeX beamer for that.
The bad thing is... academic journals and conferences accept only LaTeX. Research articles often end up packaged in a larger work like a PhD dissertation. Amending markup from LaTeX to ConTeXt is painful. So one ends up using the inferior tool (LaTeX) for typesetting one's own larger work too, like I did :( (Though I used Koma-script classes instead of standard LaTeX classes.)
The Wiki is really good and links to a lot of resources, the TeX stackoverflow also provides lots of help.