Prototypes can serve a wide range of purposes. If you haven’t done so yet I encourage you to read previous posts in which we’ve looked at prototypes that help define the user experience and others that evaluate technical feasibility.

In this post we’ll look at another kind of prototypes, those that are used as a sales tool.

Prototypes as a sales tool
Sometimes clients come to us with very ambitious and exciting application ideas. At this point, their internal teams have spent some time giving birth to these ideas and are working towards getting them green lit to become actual products. In order for these projects to ever see the light of day, our clients usually need to get approval from stakeholders higher up in their organizations. These stakeholders are not designers or developers; they are business people. So for them to be able to fully grasp the value of these potential products it’s essential to present them with a visual depiction of how these applications might look and behave. It’s our goal to help these clients make a strong case for the investment that these projects will require when fully produced.

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Complexity requires fierce collaborators
The complexities of working with global brands in the digital landscape require Odopod to be a deeply collaborative company. We are often one partner in a large ecosystem of other agencies and internal teams, all servicing different aspects of our clients marketing and communication needs. For this reason, we have embraced our role as collaborator and strive to forge formidable partnerships.

Knowing our role in these loose confederates is paramount. Too frequently, overreaching agencies debate their area of ownership and jostle for the client’s favor, which can be a recipe for dysfunction and subpar work.

I’ve found that effective ecosystems surrounding a brand must demonstrate the attributes of any productive and successful team – specifically; mutual trust, mutual respect, complete communication as well as a shared purpose and vision.

Beyond merely accepting the idea of collaboration, the larger team must invite it. Desire it. Even, when required, fight for it.

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Communication Arts so graciously featured the work and the culture of Odopod in the 2010 Photography Annual. We hope you enjoy the article.

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Communication Arts
Photography Annual July/August 2010
By Sam McMillan

Odopod
On the spacious sunlit second floor of the San Francisco loft they call simply, The Studio, 30 of Odopod's production staff are quietly at work. Arrayed in three long columns, worktables are placed end-to-end and front to-front. Each column constitutes a multidisciplinary team of graphic designers, interaction designers, programmers and art production staffers. The close quarters means the teams constantly face each other, and have no choice but to engage and interact with one another.

The physical layout of the Studio is modeled on small independent production studios that hark back to Odopod's genesis eight years ago. As Odopod matures and grows, co-founder and creative director Tim Barber explains that the floor plan is a way of maintaining the creative energy, jump-starting the free-flow of ideas and sharing resources. Between the columns, the teams are matrixed to encourage cross-team communication. So a programmer can simply turn around and ask a member of another team for advice, help troubleshooting or just extend an invitation to get lunch.

Each team is led by an associate creative director and a senior producer. The arrangement is "a legacy of our training as architects," Barber says. 'We're still fascinated by the idea of shaping spaces to help us work and interact better." It seems to be working.

At a time when many agencies are downsizing, Odopod is thriving, winning new clients, capturing every award in sight, generating huge industry buzz and, yes... hiring. Today, Odopod creates digital marketing for clients like Nike, Sony and Red Bull that want to reach an audience on the Web.

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FITC just announced its San Francisco lineup - full of inspirational speakers from all over the world including Odopod's Associate Technical Director, Boris Pique. FITC comes to San Francisco August 17-19 with Boris' talk, "Innovation through Collaboration," being held on the 19th at 12:30.

For the full schedule visit FITC San Francisco. See you there!

Interesting bits from around the web as uncovered by the Odopod Code Forum.

Adobe's iPad-izer
Adobe worked with Wired to bring a digital version of their magazine to the iPad as a native app. Here's an interesting article about how it was built.
• Cool: Nicely designed. Seeing Adobe trying to provide alternative tools to create content for iOS.
• Not Cool: A 527 MB download and being all image-based doesn't seem like a viable approach.

Exposing Audio Data to JavaScript
In a previous post we pointed out the limitations of the current html5 audio tag not having access to raw data. It turns out that a group of web audio and Mozilla developers are working on bringing audio data to audio and video elements.
• Cool: Offering a solution to bring raw audio data to the browser. This is essential to be able to create web-based audio applications or at least fully featured audio players.
• Not cool: As usual, when will we have this (or something like it) for ALL browsers?

SmokeScreen
Open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5.
• Cool: Simplifying the conversion of Flash ads to JS and HTML (who loves making ads?)
• Not cool: We did a quick test and unless your swf is timelined and really simple it won’t work. Minimal bits of ActionScript broke it.

Web Fonts at the Crossing
A very nice and concise article about the history and current landscape of web fonts.
• Cool: A List Apart bringing great and relevant content to the web.
• Not cool: Nothing really.

Click for more...

This week's discussion on technology from around the web.

Edwin – a speech-to-speech assistant (think accessibility) Android app built by one of our very own developers Carl Rice. Some cool features include asking for weather, location, translations, closest public transportation, etc. Note that the app is in an early alpha stage, this is a very early release and still a work-in-progress.
• Cool: It only took Carl under a week from downloading the SDK to publishing the app to the Android Market. Cool? More like Awesome!
• Not cool: Carl showed the app in our forum and you won’t get the full effect until you see it in person.

A Book Apart - "A Book Apart publishes highly detailed and meticulously edited examinations of single topics"
• Cool: Zeldman and company bringing insightful books to the world. We are excited to get our hands on their first published book, HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith. Here’s an interview with Jeremy about the book.
• Not cool: We need to wait a couple more weeks. We want more!

HTML5 Doctype - "... you can write your web pages in a completely standards-based way (CSS, HTML5, JavaScript) and not have to use a single browser-centric tag in order to do so."
• Cool: New doctype will be supported by current browsers even if they don't implement the new html5 spec, they will just switch to standards mode.
• Not cool: We have to test this to believe it!

This week's discussion on technology from around the web.

Akihabara - A set of libraries, tools and presets to create pixelated indie-style 8/16-bit era games in Javascript.
• Cool: HTML5 GPL2/MIT licensed game library.
• Not cool: Still in its infant stage, no documentation, only 2D (no isometry), no audio yet, etc.

Interface - Mockup & prototyping app for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
• Cool: No coding experience needed to put together a prototype, hello prototyping designers!
• Not cool: Missing important features to be completely viable such as the ability to run on the desktop or sharing prototypes with other phones.

Volkswagen App my Ride - Contest to design car UI.
• Cool: Potentially designing a car interface that millions of people see.
• Not cool: VW trying to get design work for free.

Apps for Healthy Kids - Competition to end childhood obesity within a generation.
• Cool: Being part of a good cause.
• Not cool: Not having time for pro bono work.

Here at Odopod, the dev team meets weekly to talk about what's happening with technology around the web. Here's our top this week:

Aves - Paul Bakaus' JavaScript game engine.
• Cool: Everything.
• Not cool: It won't be released as open source (hey the man needs to make money right?)

scene.nr - Eddie Abrams' HTML5 audio project.
• Cool: HTML5 Winamp port including Winamp skin loading.
• Not cool: It still relies on Flash to grab the raw audio data.

UI Thread Presentation - Nicholas C. Zakas' super interesting talk from the jQuery conference.
• Cool: Understanding the inner workings of the UI Thread allows us to be smarter about page loading as well as maximizing user perception of speed.
• Not cool: The UI thread is a linear queue of execution.

Web Workers - Defines an API for running scripts in the background independently of any user interface scripts.
• Cool: Asynchronous JavaScript execution.
• Not cool: Only Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 currently support this.

Our guest speaker series continued this month with an inspirational presentation from Kyle Blue, Design Director of Dwell.

Kyle presented his impressive evolution as a designer, sharing his work with bold typography and fluorescent colors during his fellowship at Walker Art Center, his beautifully designed print materials from his position as Senior Designer at Apple and his long and colorful journey through the redesign process of a magazine as Design Director at Dwell.

The team was inspired by the process and the history that Kyle shared, both from the magazine and from his own talented progression in life and we were excited to hear that he has drawn some of his own inspiration from our work on Nike Skate. It was a pleasure having him in the studio.

For more on Kyle visit his portfolio and spend some time on dwell.com.

TwitterSketch is the result of some experiments I've been doing lately using the Twitter API (via Tweetr) to control dynamic Flash animations.

It searches Twitter for the most recent posts that contain either direction words ("up" "down" "left" or "right") or color words ("red" "blue" "green" etc). The drawing 'cursor' creates circles of varying sizes and fades older circles over time. The app reads Twitter results word by word - when a matching word comes up it either moves the cursor or changes the color. If the word doesn't match, the cursor continues drawing at the last color or position. New results are fetched every 20 seconds, causing a slight delay between realtime posts and visual output.

As words become more frequent, overall moods and motion trends will start to appear. For example, it seems that "up" is generally more frequently used than "down".

The more I watch the animation, the more ideas come to mind including future explorations on mining public data sources (like Twitter) to graph trends or just to creating interesting artistic systems that are essentially controlled by the public subconscious.

Visit TwitterSketch »