Prototypes sound good: they suggest innovation and flexibility, without the cost of setting anything in stone.

As a digital innovation agency, we’ve built a good few prototypes for our clients. Alas, these prototypes have been some of our least satisfying projects.

Yes, we've been inspired by the initial vision. Yes, we’ve worked hard to make the client happy. Yes, we’ve gone the extra mile to delight. And yet, and yet... something has never quite clicked.

What goes wrong?

Slip

With no go-live date, difficult decisions get delayed.

Bloat

There are bigger ambitions for a prototype than for a normal project. Freed from the constraints of shipping code, everyone hopes to create something game-changing. Extra features get added as the team grasp towards that big ambition.

Lack of Focus

Not wanting to blame the client, but... usually there’s no one at the client firm who is totally focused on the prototype. A prototype is often a bit of a hobby, somewhere down the to-do list.

Good digital products are often simple ideas kept sharp by hard design decisions. Prototypes pull in the opposite direction.

Picture the scene: the BACON team are settling down for a strategy session. Mugs of tea in hand, thinking caps on, plates of crispy rashers at the ready.

We had decided to set ourselves a mission: How can we help someone convince their boss to let them attend BACON?

We reckon BACON offers tremendous value - but your boss might need a little bit of persuading that a conference is a worthwhile investment of time and money. So, we could make one of those generic bullet-pointed pdfs...

Or we could do something a little bit more, well, BACON. Something tasty, tempting, and just the right amount of fun.

BACON is Mint's conference for developers, by developers, on things developers love.

Think music, rocket science, games and superheroes. Plus plenty of brain food - on everything from the history of Raspberry Pi, to why Go drinks Node and Scala's milkshake. It's all happening on April 12th and 13th, in central London. Oh, and there's bacon. Lots of bacon.

So, you're pretty much sold, right? But maybe you think your boss is going to need a bit more convincing?

Your worries are over. We've been cooking up something special, just for you...

Some of you are probably wondering what we made at 4D2L.

First, let's remind ourselves of the brief:

"The education industry is charging far too much for a product that is of questionable, and declining, value. Can we create a product or service that tackles some small part of this problem?"

This post is short and sweet, showing the things we made and a line about how we validated ideas. You might see more details on certain projects in the next few weeks.

So, what did we make?

Mint are off on our annual hack week /booze-a-thon - 4 Days 2 Launch (previously the Web App Weekender, until we realised it had ceased to be about web apps, and is no longer on a weekend).

Every year we head off to the seaside, divide into three teams and tackle a product development challenge designed to scratch our creative itches and sharpen our skills. The winning project from 2012's 4D2L was Foldable.Me, which was 1000% funded on Kickstarter and is now a thriving cardboard buddy creation business. The bar is high...

Although a little later than originally planned, Iteration 3 of the Mint site is now live.

This update brings in a new visual style. We updated typography and tweaked the colours a little, then styled all the pages in line with this. You'll notice it's a little basic at places, but this is our first take and I'm sure the style will change as we bring in more content.

I've also started documenting the iterations over at Flickr, if you wanted to see how the site is changing.

The hardest person to design for is yourself. All intuition disappears and you over question every decision.

That's a familiar tale, I'm sure, to any digital company that ever embarked on redesigning their website. For ages, we too have been suffering from this. In the drive for perfection, it's easy to end up not doing anything. So, we decided to do something.

Hello everyone! I'd like to introduce our latest product, Projecteo.

Projecteo is a tiny Instagram projector about the size of matchbox. It works by projecting light from an LED through a 'wheel' of instagrams developed onto Kodak 35mm slide film. Wheels are replaceable and hold nine images. You turn the wheel to cycle through your images.

Projecteo smashed expectations and hit its Kickstarter goal of $18,000 in under 22 hours.

The campaign has been covered by a range of great press and has even had celebrity endorsements. Highlights include:

“Now this is SICK!!!” - Nick Cannon

“For committed fans of retro photography apps such as Instagram, it could be the ultimate way to continue the retro theme.” - Daily Mail Online

I joined CharityHack over the weekend. It was an awesome hack. I just wanted to say thanks.

To @johnxcom and @sauliuz and the rest of the @charityhack crew.

To the caterers, who fed us all so well. The mini-burgers were a delight.

To all the hackers who made the place feel full of energy and drive.

To @stefek99, half hacker, half raver, constant source of entertainment.

To @pornelski, an excellent developer. We made OhCharity together and it scooped the top prize! (OhCharity needs some more work, don't make a widget just yet).

I'm already looking forward to Charity Hack 2013.

For the second year running, we hosted four graduates for three months at Mint under Foundry, our graduate scheme. This year, their brief was 'Make a toy that has a reason to exist.' What they ended up making is, well, insane.

Facebook came out last week and made a bold statement - 'Chairs are like Facebook'.

We like chairs. Everyone likes chairs. So we got to thinking. What else are like chairs?

Easy.

Foldables.

Our 3D cardboard avatar creation service Foldable.Me launches today. The video above is a lovely introduction to Foldable, so to maximise the chance that you click on it, I won't write another word.

My favourite Mint job ad ever said:

We all have a responsibility to help those less experienced than ourselves… It's the nature of life that we can never really repay those mentors, so the only thing we can do is help others to develop their skills as well.

What's true for individuals is also true for companies. Mint has been tremendously fortunate with the help we received - particularly from our chairman David Frank. We are keen to pass the good karma along.

For the next three months, we're sharing our London office with two startups:

• Kooki - a mobile loyalty card app

• SketchStreet - a crowd-sourced fashion community, with built-in fulfilment

We hope they'll benefit from mingling with like-minded souls. We hope to learn something from their entrepreneurialism.

(Close followers of Mint may notice this is similar to last year's Don't Be A Banker scholarship.)

(Apologies, this news is about 6 weeks late.)

Picklive, the real-time fantasy football game spun out from Mint, has sold to a team headed by David Galan, CEO of Soccer Millions. Galan says:

We are delighted to have acquired Picklive. The founding team has developed world-class and truly innovative technology, which we believe is a unique fusion of sportsbetting, in-play engagement and social style gaming and that will undoubtedly appeal to gaming operators.

It’s great for Picklive as it gets the financial clout and distribution expertise to take it to the next stage. It’s great for Mint, as Noam and, shortly, Tim, return to the mothership. Welcome back, guys!

So, did you Join In last weekend?

To be honest, when we first started working on the website for Join In - a weekend of free local sport across the country - I didn’t really think I was the target audience. I’m not the sporty type. I think it comes from being a defiantly geeky kid in a house of enthusiastic football fans, and going to an overwhelmingly sports-mad high school alongside the likes of Andy Murray. I still regard the gym as a necessary evil.

But then we had the Olympics. And nobody was more surprised than me at how unexpectedly awesome it all was. I think the thing that I found most inspiring was reflecting on the incredible work ethic, discipline and self-motivation of all those athletes. What if we all applied a similar kind of drive to our working lives? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

I also started thinking about my own attitude to sport because, frankly, it all did look really fun. And so I found myself browsing the lovely Join In site to see what was happening near me. In the end I chose fencing, because I’ve always wanted to try it.

What an amazing few days we have seen at the Olympics. Team GB have done us proud.

What more can be said?

Well, perhaps you start getting that guilty, too-much-sofa feeling. After all, the best part of sport is getting trainers on your feet, air in your lungs and endorphins in your noggin.

Working with a new charity, Join In, Mint built a site that make it easier to do just that, to get involved. Focused on the weekend after the Olympics, it is a celebration of local sport. And you are invited!

A couple of months ago, we excitedly announced the return of Foundry for 2012. Following a call for applications, we took over one of the shipping containers at Boxpark and invited our shortlist down to a day long workshop, as part of Uncontained.

The workshop was lots of fun and the selection process tough, but it now gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the team following the footsteps of Foundry 2011 and Olly. In their own words, they are…

We've just launched Mad World, an interactive audio experience that invites you to take a trip inside three very different brains, brought to life with the help of some mind-blowing binaural audio.

Mad World is the online companion piece to Channel 4's 4 Goes Mad - a season of prime-time programmes challenging mental health stigma and discrimination. The season kicks off on Monday 23rd July, visit the website for more info.

Developed in collaboration with mental health charities Time to Change, Rethink Mental Illness and Mind, Mad World explores three of the most misunderstood mental health conditions – schizophrenia, OCD and bipolar disorder.

We are delighted to announce Sexperience came away as the winner for 'Best Website' at last night's Broadcast Digital Awards.

We have been working on Sexperience with Channel 4 for the last four years, improving it year on year. In this refresh, we concentrated on unifying the areas of the site under topics most relevant to teenagers. We also made waves with Sexperience 1000, an interactive data visualiser around sex we realised with the help of our partners Lingobee.

Thanks to the Mints who all worked very hard on Sexperience, thanks to Endemol for their contributions and thanks to Adam Gee and all at Channel 4 for the opportunity to keep making great work. Last but not least, thanks to Broadcast Magazine for the hangover.

To celebrate the Diamond Jubilee, we made a portrait of the Queen from 1000s of StickyGrams.