Our friends at the Awwwards asked some questions to Jason Hardy, one of the Creative Directors here at Odopod. He's on the panel of judges this year, so treat him right. Here's the interview, republished in full, for your viewing pleasure.

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Odopod is one of the best and most awarded agencies around, It’s based in San Francisco and is formed by top designers, developers, strategists and in general very inventive people. They’re responsible for works like: IWC, Sony Tablet S and many more amazing works. We’ve had the pleasure of talking to their creative director, Jason Hardy.

Awwwards: Please tell us a little bit about yourself: who are you, where do you come from and where are you going?

JH: My name is Jason Hardy, I am a Creative Director at Odopod in San Francisco. I originally come from Nebraska. I’m not really sure where I’m going, probably to get a sandwich or some coffee.

Awww: What did you do before becoming a designer / developer?

JH: I went to school for Journalism and intended to be a writer. When I graduated there were no writing jobs where I lived (surprise!) so I took a basic design job instead. I had always been interested in design, mostly through skateboard magazines and album art, the typical influences, but never really thought of it as an option for making a living. Once I went down that path, I became pretty driven to learn as much as I could and never really looked back.

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We've got a busy next few months, packed with projects launching, a growing studio space, and some amazing new clients coming on board. In the midst of all that good stuff, we're also sending some Odopod thought leaders out into the world to participate in some talks and some panels in some amazing places. Come meet us!

RE:DESIGN/UX Design
April 30 - May 1, San Francisco

Join Albert Poon, Odopod's Director of Interaction Design in his talk, Welcome to the Post-PC Era.

About this talk: The age of desktop being the primary platform for digital experiences is over. Yes, there are hundreds of millions of traditional PCs with web browsers. They will not disappear. But even the most cursory look at the sales numbers should make it clear that the era of the big screen-keyboard-mouse digital experience is waning.

Planning-ness
May 17 - 18, Santa Monica

Join Guthrie Dolin, Director of Brand and Strategy and David Bliss, Founder and Executive Technical Director in Connected Personal Objects: Getting Intimate with the Internet of Things.

About this talk: The Internet of Things is a vast and rapidly expanding landscape that encompasses complex infrastructural systems to the everyday objects found in our homes and even on our person. At its core is a network of uniquely identifiable “things” with the ability to sense their environment then communicate with one another and us. In our presentation we will breakdown the key attributes and technologies that define these connected “things” as well as demonstrate how some of the most progressive connected personal objects may be shaping our future.

C2-MTL
May 22 - 25, Montreal

Join Odopod Founder and Executive Creative Director, Tim Barber in The Eureka! Moment, a discussion lead by Dr. Rex Jung, assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico who is exploring the structural and biochemical correlates of intelligence, creativity and positive affect.

DMI Design/Management Thinking 24
June 19-20, Portland

Guthrie Dolin will be doing a talk on Little "i" Innovation: The Practice of Continual Incremental Improvement

About this talk: When it comes to design-led innovation, we love the big idea—those breakthrough inventions that signal a disruptive change. But these big ideas are rarely the result of a single moment of genius. Instead, it comes from the culmination of smaller ideas, developed over time, from the minds of many. The ideas that really stick in our fast-paced digital world are the ones that “live in beta”—embracing a culture of learning, adapting and improving every day. In Little “i” Innovation, we will explore how the process of continual, incremental improvement has been used to develop some of the world’s most innovative and dominant consumer brands.

If you're headed to any of these events, please be sure to join us or just stop by and say hello. We'd love to meet you!

We're extremely pleased to announced that IWC and EA have been recognized in the 16th Annual Webby Awards! IWC has been named as an official honoree, while EA has been nominated in the Games-Related category. Love the site? Help us win by voting for EA in the People's Voice Awards. Thanks!

2011 was a huge year for Odopod. The biggest news of all was our merger with Nurun, the largest independent digital agency in the world. Together, Odopod and Nurun have an impressive combination of reach, depth, and talent that will enable us to do even more innovative work for our clients around the world. For more on the merger, read Tim Barber's article, Odopod and Nurun: Our Next Big Move.

Last year, we launched some of our most exciting work to date. Among the highlights, we redefined luxury online for IWC, establishing direct relationships with its fans. We helped EA revolutionize the way people buy, play and share games with Origin. With Tesla Motors, we created a series of interactive kiosks for their innovative new retail strategy. We also continued producing great work for Sony Electronics, Google, Plum Organics, and more.

Of course, we had some fun too. On Hack Days, we shut down our office and prototyped our own ideas. With the FWATV, we experimented with live video and Processing to give people a fun look inside our office. We shared some inside details about the culture of Odopod, we played a bit of dodgeball, and we won Advertising Age's Small Agency of the Year, West - what a year!

All in all, we couldn't be more proud of the people we've hired (and we're hiring more), the things we've done, and the projects we've launched (including the ones we can't share) during this amazing year.

Here's a round up of this year's work:

International Watch Company (IWC) :: Origin from EA :: EA.com :: Sony PIIQ
Ford Sync :: Plum Organics Quest for Yum! :: Tesla Retail Kiosks
Sony Tablet S :: Google for Veterans :: Plum Organics Contest :: Sony Personal 3D Viewer

Hack Days at Odopod is an incredible time of year. For 48 hours, we shut down the office, turn inward and focus on our own ideas. It’s a chance for us to build the kind of things that our clients don't ask for every day and just invent.

It starts off with an open call for ideas. Eight are picked and small teams are formed to produce the projects over two days. Everybody takes part - designers, developers, producers and strategists - all racing toward the same intense deadline, with a heightened sense of focus, creative energy and collaboration.

The culmination of Hack Days is a series of prototypes and proofs-of-concept.

Here are the results...

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It's that time of year again for another two days of closed-door hacking, tinkering and building prototypes for projects of our own devising.

Each year, we ask everyone in our studio to submit ideas that they've always wanted to make. There are no rules and no restrictions - the only ask is to describe the idea in 100 words or less.

From there, we make selections, split into eight teams and build the ones we love. We're just in the midst of the final selection process (as seen above) and are extremely excited about how the submissions are turning out so far.

This year, it all goes down November 9th and 10th.

We'll keep you posted on progress and process - in the meantime, check out the results of Hack Days 2010.

We're excited to share the second installment of our Babies for Yum! campaign for Plum Organics — the Quest for Yum! Odopod conceived and produced this whimsical video in which our baby hero explores the world of Yuck and Yum in search of the tastiest food.

As with our our caption contest on Facebook, the program is highly-targeted to modern moms and designed to thrive on the "authentic" and social web.

Our media strategy is focused on mom-centric blogs and causal online gaming sites where our target audience consumes, shares and engages with content.

Big thanks to our friends at Adobe for calling on Tim to chat about HTML, Flash and our work at Odopod. This video was featured during Adobe MAX October 1-5, 2011. Check it out.

Though we didn't exactly win Design Dodgeball 2011, we definitely had a solid showing, surpassing last year's performance tenfold. In fact, we killed it through the semi-finals and lost with our heads held high against a worthy adversary, frog design.

Here's the team looking especially deadly in our highly intimidating uniforms designed by the talented, Mr. Jason Hardy. We'll be back in the game next year and next year, we're out for blood.

Starting tomorrow through September 8th, Telly Koosis, Senior Developer at Odopod will join 350+ other Django developers at DjangoCon in Portland, Oregon. Django is Odopod's preferred back-end framework, which makes this conference simply too important to miss.

We've used Django on some of our most robust websites, including IWC.com, DonQ.com, and even our own site – odopod.com. With Django, we can create a rich variety of experiences, develop rapidly with the core features needed for content management systems, and access Django's vibrant community to easily extend its core capabilities.

For Telly, DjangoCon is not just about the sessions. We're sending him on a mission to find people who want to join our team. We’re looking for people of varying skill-levels who are passionate about Django (including the sysadmin bits) who also enjoy pixel-perfect front-end coding. Our developers all share an interest in design and user experience in addition to writing great code.

Of course, we're also interested in meeting freelancers, development agencies, and related technology vendors. So, If you're at DjangoCon this week and want to learn more about Odopod, say hello and we'll connect you with Telly.