Duke Commencement Program

Colleges & Universities

March 31, 2023

Project Overview

For the past 5 years Duke University has called on Telepathic Graphics to produce their graduation commencement ceremony program. The program consisted of a 64 page plus cover, saddle stitched booklet with a blind embossed logo on the cover. The project was extremely time sensitive with over 13,000 guests expected to attend the event and each expecting a commencement program that many would cherish as a souvenir of the milestone event.

Challenge

The University needed 15,500 commencement programs to be printed and delivered on short notice to hand out May 8th at the 9am ceremony in Wallace Wade stadium. Printing could not begin until all the last minute edits to the files were made and signed off on just days prior to the event.

Solution

All Telepathic Graphic employees were on standby to work through the night and weekend to meet the deadline. Covers had been printed and embossed in advance. We received approval to begin printing the interior pages at 2pm on Thursday May 5 and immediately jumped into action. Within 24 hours we had printed over 140,000 press sheets and began stitching the books into final form. Our dedicated staff worked through the night on Friday with a fresh shift coming in on Saturday to complete the job.

Results

All 15,500 programs were actually completed well ahead of schedule and delivered to Duke University campus on Saturday May 7th at 4pm.

As an added footnote, Telepathic Graphics successfully repeated this undertaking for several other schools including Meredith College, NCSU and NC Central!