Joe Stanton is a fourth-year marketing and entrepreneurship student at Iowa State University with a 3.71 GPA. He has strengths in graphic design, photography, cinematography, and entrepreneurship. Through his self-designed portfolio, he showcases his graphic design work for his company Ash Avenue Prints, his user experience design work for Principal Financial Group, his photography and nature photos, and videos he has created. He is currently seeking a full-time position.

1. PORTFOLIO
2019
JOESTANTON

2. ABOUTME
NAME:
COLLEGE:
MAJOR:
GPA:
HOMETOWN:
STRENGTHS:
PROGRAMS:
Joe Stanton
Iowa State
Marketing &
Entrepreneurship
3.71
Centennial, CO
Illustration,
Photography, &
Cinematography
Premiere Pro,
Illustrator, Photoshop,
Lightroom, InDesign,
and Audition
TABLEOF CONTENTS
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Ash Avenue Prints
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Principal Financial
PHOTOGRAPHY
Photo Album
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Videos
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ABOUT ME .................................................................................. 3
DEAR
READER
2 3
my name is Joe
Stanton. I am
currently a fourth-
year student at Iowa
State University majoring
in Marketing and
Entrepreneurship. My
strengths include strategic
thinking, communication,
illustration, and relationship
building. Marketing
allows me to express my
graphic design skills and
communicate through
illustration. I'm also raised
to believe that every piece of
marketing plays a critical role
in the desired objective.
I started off my college
experience as an
Environmental Engineer,
a profession lacking in
the brand marketing
department. Although
receiving a 3.51 GPA, I
decided it best to pursue a
more passionate option.
Unfortunately, Iowa State
University doesn’t allow
for non-design majors to
minor in the College of
Design. I have been self-
taught in my graphic design
practice, photography, and
cinematography so I decided
to continue this technique.
I eventually combined my
business majors to self-start
my own design business.
In my portfolio, you will
find the extensive work of
my college career being a
self-starter, dreamer, and
a creator. I am currently
seeking out a full-time
position.
HI

3. GRAPHICDESIGN
eet kicked up on the desk,
my finest corduroy blazer, a
40-year-old as my business
partner, and a crayon in hand.
Scribbled at the top of my paper is
“The GREAT BOWLIN’ ALLEY.”
One of my greatest childhood
dreams was drafting up blueprints
for my very own arcade with my
twin sister and my dad. The thing
that excited me most about the
dream, besides the endless amount
of arcade tickets, was how creative
I could be with my ideas. How
there was no limit to what I could
create and what I could make. I
think this is truly where I fell in
love with creativity and eventually
entrepreneurship.
I went on to be the editor-in-
chief of my high school newspaper
where I would direct a quarterly
publication with stories and
features, and I fell in love with
cinematography and photography.
I valued the opportunity to develop
something unique, new, and my
own. I enjoyed the feedback and
collaboration with my peers, which
lead to personnel improvement.
I decided to be a Marketing and
Entrepreneurship Major at Iowa
State and continued to be self-
taught in Graphic Design.
The hard part was figuring out
what I wanted to do with this major
and what I wanted to accomplish.
An important part of my college
experience has been my fraternity
and my love for my Greek letters
and what they stand for. I wanted a
poster to show off my fraternity for
those same reasons, but there was
nothing out there in the market.
When performing a google search
for a “fraternity poster,” to my
surprise nothing came up. So, I
made and designed my own poster.
My company, Ash Avenue Prints
was born. The concept is that
anyone can come to my website,
choose from my custom-designed
posters and get them made for
their Greek chapter. I immediately
told my same 40-year old business
partner from my crayon days, my
dad. I became an Official Greek
Licensed Vendor and held General
Liability Insurance. With help from
a Summer Accelerator Program I
accumulated 20 poster designs,
selling for $22 each, and printed in
Nashville, TN. Following are a few of
those designs.
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F

4. UXDESIGN
Human Resources at Principal Financial Group felt they had
a gap in understanding of their current onboarding process.
They outlined those needs to the core design team. The team
focused on three critical objectives:
To welcome, engage & inspire new employees.
To excite new employees about Principal.
To help the new employee start on the right foot.
The core team developed a challenge statement from these
objectives to guide their thinking throughout the project:
“How might we enhance an intern’s, new hire’s, or rehire’s
onboarding experience by our delivery of timely, valuable
information, our empowerment of an individual
employee, and our presence of an inclusive culture, so
the employee’s onboarding experience is seamless from
the Principal experience?”
CHALLENGE
APPROACH
The Experience Design Strategist team worked closely with key
stakeholders of the Human Resources Department. The team
implemented Human Centered Design- a way of thinking that
means believing that all problems are solvable. Believing that
the people who face those problems are the ones who hold
the answer. Human Centered Design offers problem solvers a
way to deeply understand the people they’re looking to serve,
dream up numerous ideas, and to create new solutions rooted
in people’s actual needs.
Throughout this process, the team framed the onboarding
challenge, empathized to understand their target audience
through interviews and immersion, ideated based on
understandings and insights, concept tested and iterated based
on learnings, and delivered recommendations to Principal
Financial Group.
Within the 10-week duration of the project, the team collected
a total of 66 different perspectives on the problems at hand. In
the customer research phase alone, the team interviewed and
created journey maps with eight recent hires of PFG, observed
two internal orientation sessions at PFG, spoke with five
new hires of external companies, and consulted five outside
businesses and organizations on their onboarding process.
From there, the team and stakeholders developed five separate
themes to get at the heart of the matter within their discovery
work. These themes were used to create three design challenges
that were used to ideate and brainstorm as many solutions
as possible for the problems identified. A total of 24 diverse
employees participated in the team’s ideation sessions. It
was important to get a variety of perspectives from the target
audience.
With an abundance amount of ideas, the team clustered the
ideated solutions and consolidated the information to seven
unique concepts. These concepts were tested three times in
rapid succession in a matter of ten days. A total of 17 employees
looked at the concepts and gave gut reactions to what they
liked, disliked, and what they would change. From there the
team re-prototyped and tested the concept again. At the end of
this design sprint, the team had landed on three final concepts.
Outside of the concept itself, there were three key takeaways
about the target audience’s onboarding experience:
New employees had a desire to identify and belong to the
company as soon as possible.
New employees had a desire to feel unique and have a
personalized experience.
New employees had a desire to network organically and
interact with their peers frequently.
The final concepts, recommendations, and learnings were
delivered to a room of 22 key stakeholders: the Chief Marketing
Officer, the Head of Talent Management, the Diversity and
Inclusion Consultant, etc. These recommendations will be
used to improve and structure the new employee’s onboarding
experience moving forward.
RESULTS
This case study affirmed the importance of connecting on a
humanistic level. Fostering a sense of belonging and connecting to
each individual is key to the diverse and inclusion culture we strive
for together each day. -EricShepard,DiversityandInclusionConsultant
“
”
Principal Financial Group and Designing
the Onboarding Experience
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5. PHOTOGRAPHY
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hotography, to say the least,
is a passion. I wouldn’t
be caught dead without
a camera in my hand.
Photography is a way to capture
a single moment forever. Simple
things like my sister, with a big
grin on her face, cuddled up with
our cat, or my granddad, giving
me a big hug even as she battled
Pancreatic Cancer, on my seventh
birthday. Photography is my bridge
between the present and the past to
ensure that those memories will last
forever.
P
For me, all photography is
beautiful, every moment in time
should be kept in our camera rolls.
The point of photography is also to
be creative. It’s an art.
Nature is by far the most
inspiring thing to photography.
You don’t have to be there with
the photographer to see the
peacefulness of the photo. The
landscape, that’s in the picture,
can still there no matter where you
are in the world. The mountain
that was there a century ago will
most likely be in the same location
again today. On the other hand,
it’s still special because the lighting
in the photo will be different, the
foreground will be different, even
the lens flare will be different. Like
a snowflake, nothing is the same.
Photography allows me to look
at life in a different light; taking
photos of the present to preserve
for the future. An understatement
is that photography is my passion:
a more accurate statement is that
photography is my life’s avocation.
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6. CINEMATOGRAPHY
Click here: Alpha Delta Pi
Recruitment 2018
Click here: CPC Bid Day
2018: Iowa State
Click here: Kappa Kappa
Gamma Recruitment 2019
Click here: Alpha Gamma Rho
Women’s Appreciation Dinner
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ideography is a true
passion of mine. I first
picked up a digital camera
in middle school to record
basketball trick shots and have
somehow worked and learned along
V
the way to where I am today. I fell in
love with cinematography because
of the impact you can make through
telling a story. I love using my skill
as an opportunity to meet new
people. From sorority recruitment
videos, documentaries, to asking
people on dates, I often find myself
picking up my Canon DSLR any
chance I get. Click on the hyperlinks
down below to see some of my work.
Click here: Qi Learning
Research Group
Click here: Iowa State
Panhellenic Values
Click Here: 2018 Delta Upsilon
Rush Video | Iowa State University
Click here: Iowa State Alpha
Delta Pi: Bid Day 2018
Click here: Dance Marathon
2020: Powered by the Promise
Click here: Collegiate
Panhellenic Bid Day 2019
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