The Kyiv International Advertising Festival, known as KIAD, took place for the fifteenth time in 2014. One of its contests was called Design, and it judged not commercials but design: websites, signs, packaging, corporate identities. For the Sponge studio this review became a notable event, because the bureau submitted seven entries at once. Among them was the Estetico logo, which appears in the official results under the name “Estetico logo”.
The Corporate Identity category is responsible for the visual identity: a set of signs, fonts and colors by which a person recognizes a company or project. A logo for a magazine that the studio itself makes and publishes is a special case. Estetico is published as a non-profit Sponge edition and is dedicated to art and aesthetics, so the mark for it was not a client commission but the bureau's own statement about how it understands visual culture.
The points at the festival were awarded by the Executive Jury. Sponge's work received 28 points. The shortlist in its category started at 61 points, and a bronze award required 68 points. The gap was more than thirty points, so the Estetico logo did not end up in the final list of winners. The award thresholds in each category were different, and one cannot compare a work with neighboring contests by a single number, but the difference from the shortlist threshold speaks for itself.
The Magazine, the Website and the Bureau's Path
The magazine itself lived its own life during these months. The website Estetico.me in 2014 was included among the works of Ukrainian Design, a Ukrainian contest that judges internet projects and graphics. Earlier the bureau had already shown the theme of aesthetics in the works “The Shining Symbol of Estetico” (2013) and “A Website About Beauty Estetico”, and in 2014 the project “A Website About Art and Aesthetics” appeared, which in the studio's catalog is listed as a 2014 work.
These projects came during a period when Sponge grew noticeably in the eyes of industry publications. The studio's profile on Behance appeared on August 23, 2013, and already at the end of that year the bureau received an Honorable Mention at Awwwards, one of the main international web design competitions, where the jury selects sites by visual quality and usability. In February 2014, the portal Splashnology included Sponge's works in the selection “30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration”, where the studio took 23rd place out of thirty. Such selections are read by designers around the world, so the publication worked for recognition beyond Ukraine.
Within the bureau, other directions were also being built in these same years. Bohdan Hnatiuk, the founder of Sponge, was one of the creators of the Looks.fm service, about which Korrespondent wrote in 2015. Kyrylo Soliar, the head and product manager of Looks.fm, later became a columnist for the Goethe-Institut magazine. In 2014, the bureau also produced the animation “Alien”, which was published on Behance on August 20, 2014, and noted in the Motion Graphics section of Adobe on September 2.
Autumn 2014
In October 2014, the Ukrainian portal AIN.UA published a piece under the headline “What Dynamic Design Can Do: The Example of the Creative Bureau Sponge”. The text appeared in the same autumn when the bureau continued to run Estetico, and the magazine's logo remained one of the studio's most thoroughly analyzed works, although it received no awards at the festival.
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