For early National Signing Day on December 15, a packaging team out of the Sonoco Institute collaborated with Clemson Football to help announce their new, 2022 college recruits for an event held on campus that day. Around 150 people gathered at the Allen N. Reeves Football Complex at Clemson University on December 15: among them, many of the 12 
new recruits and their families. On stage, a set of four-foot by eight-foot board props were positioned to aid in the announcement.
The boards were created by Haley Appleby, packaging lecturer and prototyping lab manager, and a small team of packaging students. Alongside Appleby, Jeremy Deller and Luke Watrous, two packaging undergraduate students, were the brains and hands behind the project.
“We have fostered a collaborative relationship with Clemson Football through a bi-annual, Creative Inquiry course that allows students to put their creativity into action for the recruitment team each semester,” commented Appleby. “It’s through this collaboration that we are often approached to create pieces in the lab that will be used at events like these.”
From concept to final, printed piece, it took the team about a month to complete the project. Palram and Pratt Industries are two packaging material suppliers who donated substrate for the project, which was printed on the Institute’s FujiFilm Acuity digital flatbed printer and cut on the Esko Kongsberg cutting table.
The Clemson Football vlog covers Clemson’s early National Signing Day in detail. The later part of the video, at around six minutes, highlights this work done by the Packaging Science department.
