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!

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.

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.

The Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Atomic Age, the Jet Age, the Space Age and the Information Age - every technological era has brought about profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions. They've reshaped human behavior and reset reality.

But, before the full effects of each of these technological developments have taken hold and fully permeated the collective understanding, people and businesses undoubtedly found themselves navigating a strange "in-between" time - a time where future visions are uncomfortably mingled with legacy artifacts and pre-existing expectations.

Today, in the Connected Age, technological innovations are bringing about seismic shifts in our reality every day. The dust is far from settled, and perhaps, it never will be. For businesses and brands this uncertain and unpredictable landscape is wrought with danger. Red herrings, pitfalls and fruitless dead-ends surround us, while opportunity is elusive.

But fear not, Larry Johnson (Odopod's Associate Director of Strategy) and I (Director of Brand and Strategy) have been hard at work cataloging the common mistakes, collecting helpful techniques and distilling best practices to survive and thrive in today's in-between times. We've compiled them neatly, into a presentation of course, and would love the opportunity to share them with you, our industry friends and peers at SXSW 2012.

But we need your help. Please vote for our SXSW session: Danger is Everywhere: Illuminating common pitfalls of marketing's in-between times and take a peek at some example slides here.

This preview is just a taste of what's to come. We promise to keep it short, sweet and useful so send us a vote and we'll see you there.

This summer, I was given the amazing opportunity to pioneer the first design internship at Odopod after meeting with founder Tim Barber at RIT’s Industry Day. From my first day, I felt like a part of the Odopod family.

Right away, I became heavily involved with major projects for both IWC and DonQ, working on interface design, user experience, and motion studies that kept me busy throughout the summer. I was also delegated to conquer some design and development for internal projects as well.

As the team became more confident in my skills, I was given more work and more responsibility. By the end of the summer I had done everything from animating an After Effects motion study to coding HTML/CSS and designing web pages. I even had the opportunity to render stylized 3D assets, making my summer experience extremely well rounded.

Working at Odopod has really boosted my knowledge of the industry and has greatly enhanced my skills as a designer. I had the privilege of working alongside a team of incredible designers who were always ready to answer my questions, show me helpful shortcuts, and share special design techniques to improve my work and help me become more efficient.

Perhaps the most important part of the experience was learning how to work with a full team that included strategists, designers, developers, creative directors, and producers. From client meetings to lunch breaks, everything I did was always a part of a team effort. I was honored to be included on a team of people with such similar interests and personalities to my own.

I am thrilled to have had such a wonderful experience working here at Odopod. The "odopeeps" are a fun and energetic group of people that made me excited to get up and go to work each day and tackle challenges for huge clients. I am now looking forward to taking my newly acquired knowledge and skills back into the classroom so I can make my senior year the best one yet.

Last year at this time, I wrote a post entitled If you want a Job at Odopod, go to RIT.

A year later, I’m just back from my third trip to the Rochester Institute of Technology for Creativity: Careers in Motion and everything I wrote in that post still stands.

I was attending and speaking at the event. It’s a forum for students in RIT’s new media program to meet prospective employers and get feedback on their portfolios. Although it’s not billed as such, for almost everyone attending it’s a recruiting event.

The reality is that it’s a feeding frenzy.

From my perspective, it’s fascinating. Imagine a gymnasium full of representatives from the best new media companies in the world, as well as some big ad agencies and PR firms — all sitting at identical folding tables, all feverish to recruit RIT’s latest group of new media graduates. Many of these companies were making offers on the spot. Some even arrived a day early to meet with, and try to scoop the top students.

That’s because RIT is producing the best new media talent in the world.

As I described in last year’s post, the students graduate with a focus either on design or development. The program is designed to have them work both independently as well as in teams, very much as they will when they come to Odopod.

As a result, almost all the students are remarkably well rounded — many of them with abilities in both design and development. I can also tell you from past hires that the rigor and intensity of the program teaches them the value of hard work and independent initiative.

They emerge from RIT with the skills to do exceptionally well in a challenging and fast-paced company like Odopod.

My only lament is that there aren’t more of them graduating, either from RIT or other schools in the US. We need more RIT graduates and more schools producing graduates of their caliber.

Odopod started at the end of 2000. It was the dawn of the “Digital Decade.” Over the past ten years, we’ve grown from a small digital studio to a fifty-plus strategically-minded digital agency. Meanwhile, the Internet has evolved from being something people use – to how people live.  

People are boldly adopting new ways of using digital. We are empowered by our personal devices and social networks to try things that might have previously seemed too difficult, time-consuming or expensive. Cultural shifts are taking place at a massive scale to how we shop, communicate, read, consume media, play games, bank and work.

How and when did this happen?

Rewind to 2001.

The dot-com bubble had just burst. Still, there were high expectations and optimism for the Internet. The decadence and “get rich quick” schemes of the dot-com era gave way to innovation and “stuff that works.” With a glut of used furniture, office space and brilliant minds, it was a great time to start a new kind of company.

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Odopod designer Dan Becker has done something many of us have wanted to do: publish a book. Go Dan! And not only that, he's published a book about design... and beer! What could be better?

Beer: A Genuine Collection of Cans is an incredible photographic journey of vintage beer cans. He covers some brief histories, shares interesting details on unique designs and brands and brings us some crazy flavors like "Pink Champale" (which is some malted champagne beer hybrid, FYI).

You may ask where one unearths such a collection of vintage goodness. And thanks to Dan's step-father Josh Russo, we have an answer. Dan explains, "I had been aware of my step-dad’s collection for years, but had only known it to be stored in cardboard boxes around the house. It wasn’t until he put the cans on display in the basement that I got a true sense of how extensive the collection really was."

His family basement! Amazing.

The book has also been really well received across foodie, design and culture blogs as seen on Cool Hunting, epicurious and NotCot. We're proud to see the personal work of one our designers get the attention it deserves.

Pick up your copy at Chronicle Books or Amazon and as always, the book can be followed on Facebook and Twitter.

Congrats to Dan! Now go buy his book.

Lynda.com came to Odopod to get some insider information on our approach to the key business problems that many of us face in creative and design industries. They spoke with innovative thinkers from large companies like Google, Apple, and Adobe and small shops like Odopod. With these interviews, Lynda.com has developed the upcoming course, Pitching Projects and Products to Executives.

Over the next few weeks, they will be releasing short previews of the series. Today's release features our very own Founder and Creative Director Tim Barber discussing, "How do you sell yourself?" Check it out.

Find our more here »