USV Faculty

Jodi Deros
Creative Director • Entrepreneur • Designer • Educator

Jodi Deros has spent more than 30 years turning ideas into brands, products, businesses, and experiences. After graduating from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, she began her career as a graphic designer in a Boston advertising agency and worked her way into creative direction, developing campaigns for Fortune 500 brands including BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, Sylvania, and Veryfine Juice Company. That agency experience taught her how to think big, work fast, collaborate across disciplines, and most importantly, create work that must perform in the real world.

As Founder and Creative Director of ATOM Innovation, Jodi has spent the past 20+ years working with entrepreneurs, startups, and established companies – national and internation – to move ideas from the earliest spark through strategy, development, branding, design, packaging, digital experiences, marketing, and commercialization. She has worked across an unusually broad range of industries, from consumer products and technology to luxury, hospitality, energy, education, and everything in between. Her role often begins before there is even a name for the thing being created, helping clients define the opportunity, understand the audience, challenge the assumptions, and turn an idea into something people can understand, want, and ultimately use.

Teaching has been a natural extension of that work. Jodi has taught at Arizona State University and now brings her real-world experience into the classroom at University of Silicon Valley. She particularly enjoys working with students at the point where an idea is still messy and full of possibility, helping them learn how to question, explore, test, communicate, and make something stronger than what they started with. She also believes students should understand that creativity is not confined to a design studio. Strategy, storytelling, business, technology, research, communication, and problem-solving are all part of the creative process.

Over the years, work has also taken Jodi to plenty of interesting places. What began as travel driven by projects, clients, and the practical necessities of running a business gradually became a creative process of its own. New places, unfamiliar perspectives, and the occasional change of scenery have a way of shaking loose assumptions and making room for better ideas.

Jodi is endlessly curious and has never been particularly good at leaving a question alone. She likes to pull at the loose threads, make unexpected connections, and explore what might be possible before narrowing in on what will work. That curiosity is at the heart of Blue Sky Visioneering, her approach to giving ideas room to wander before bringing them back to earth.