Ukrainian Design is a Ukrainian design competition in which entries are judged within individual categories. Best of is considered the highest distinction in its category, so an award for a television mark means recognition not only for the artwork but also for work in a genre where a logo must be recognisable on screen within seconds. On the competition's website, the entry is listed in category C-I-2 under the name “KTK channel logo”, with studio Sponge D&D named as the participant.
The work itself dates from 2014, while the award came at the 2015 competition. Such a gap is typical for broadcast graphics design: a logo is put on air and then goes on to enter the competition season. For the studio, this was not its first experience in the television segment. A year earlier, at Ukrainian Design 2014, the logo for Pershyi Miskyi received Best of in category C-I-5, and it is this work that is generally regarded as the bureau's first television mark to be recognised by the competition.
KTK was part of the Odesa television holding Kozyr Digital. On 10 December 2014, Oleksandr Kozyr, Honoured Journalist of Ukraine and head of UTK Kozyr Digital, listed the company's channels: A1, Zdorovya, GTV, GNews, Odessa Fashion Channel and KTK. This confirms the channel's affiliation with the holding, and it is in this context that the KTK logo should be seen as part of Odesa's television landscape at the time.
Odesa broadcasting and the studio in 2014
Autumn 2014 was a notable period for Sponge. At the same Ukrainian Design 2014, work for the website Estetico.me received Best of in category B-1, and the logo for Pershyi Miskyi was recognised in category C-I-5. In October 2014, Ukrainian publications also mentioned the studio: Detector Media wrote about the bureau's projects on 14 October, and AIN.UA about the studio's dynamic design on 17 October. On the same day, 17 October, Creativity Ukraine listed Sponge in an interim ranking at 12th place with 4 points.
The bureau's internal structure was also publicly visible at the time. Executive Director Kyrylo Solyar gave an interview to Innabits in August 2014, while lead designer Serhiy Semernyov, who was also director and co-owner of SPONGE STORE, ran his own area. The founder of the bureau remains Bohdan Hnatiuk, under whose leadership the studio handled television and website commissions simultaneously.
The final ranking for the 2014/2015 season was more modest: the bureau took 21st place with 4 points. Yet in the same season the studio also appeared on the international stage. The Sponge website received CSS Winner SOTD on 13 June 2015 with a score of 7.5, and on 8 August the site was recognised as Site of the Day on Awwwards with a score of 7.03. SOTD stands for “site of the day”, a separate mark of recognition for a single work on a single day, and for a studio from Odesa such accolades matter as an external benchmark.
Television graphics at Ukrainian Design 2015
At the same 2015 competition, the television theme was represented more broadly. Studio Geeks Empire received Best of in category C-II-3 for the TV intro. Entries in television graphics categories are judged by the same rules as websites but with their own criteria: what matters is how a mark or title sequence looks in the broadcast flow, how well it scales, and how memorable it is during a short appearance.
For Sponge, the win in category C-I-2 confirmed that the television segment, begun with work for Odesa channels, was developing in parallel with websites. The bureau worked on both internet projects and corporate identity for media, and the awards reflected both lines. The Sponge D&D website received Best of in category B-1 at the same competition, meaning that in 2015 the studio was recognised simultaneously for a web project and for a television mark.
What came next
In autumn 2015, attention shifted to digital awards. At the Golden Site 2015 ceremony on 22 October, the Sponge website took first place in the Digital Agency Website category, and the developers' ranking based on the award's results placed the studio 17th–19th with 9 points.
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