Overview

Duke is a vibrant, dynamic, diverse, global, elite intellectual community.

Duke’s message stands on three pillars and fulfills a common goal:

  1. Academic Rigor
  2. Spirit and Pride
  3. Boundless Opportunity

Goal: The value of a Duke educational experience.

Tone

“Tone” describes the feeling or emotion of how a written document sounds as you read it to yourself. Tone can take on many forms and can remain the same or change quickly throughout a story. It can be expressed through the formality or informality, complex or simplistic style and syntax of the writing.

Using Duke’s tone in your writing will capitalize on the strength and cache of the brand. This aligns you with the highest levels of the enterprise and builds build greater consistency across all University communications and identifiable cohesion among our materials.

Ambitious, Audacious, Young, Passionate, Innovative, Creative, Achieve, Renewal

Adjust for Your Medium

We encourage you to interpret and apply tone as you would a color palette or collection of visual assets. Use your creative sensibilities and promotional goals to decide which elements to employ.

Base your decisions on your audience and the channel you are using to reach them. For example, as shown in the diagram below, you might emphasize certain aspects of the brand when addressing students, and accentuate others when communicating with donors.

You might also adopt a more abbreviated, casual tone for digital channels than you would for print. And a video script will likely be more conversational than a webpage. Your audience and goals should drive these choices.

Messaging

Messaging refers to the consistent use language to relay the key themes of the University. These words are intended to show how we connect these themes to the University’s history, culture, and people. They should serve as a guide to creative work, particularly in developing copy, and as a framework that further expands and expresses each of these core ideas.

[THIS IS DUKE]

Duke is the leading private research university created in the 20th century. It is a young university dedicated to superior liberal education and committed to attaining and maintaining a place of real leadership in all that we do. Its interest extends beyond the intellectual growth of a student but also their development as adults committed to high ethical standards and full participation as leaders in their communities. It is ambitious, high achieving and remains committed to the central values of teaching, learning, healing, discovery, and servitude to its community and the world at large.