Odesa studio Sponge was founded in 2009 and is known to the Ukrainian web community for its websites and advertising projects. In October 2014, AIN.UA listed among its works Estetico.me, Looks.fm and. That same year, Estetico.me received recognition at the Ukrainian Design competition, where the logo for 'Pershyi Miskyi' was also noted. The bureau had already caught the eye of the professional community: in December 2013, Awwwards gave the studio's website an honorable mention, and in February 2014, Splashnology included Sponge in its '30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration' selection at 23rd place out of thirty. The bureau set up a Behance profile in August 2013, and that platform became the studio's main showcase for its work.
An alien as an advertising hero
The Alien video was dedicated to the bureau's favorite character, the Alien from the eponymous cult film. The work was published on Behance on August 20, 2014, and two weeks later, on September 2, it appeared in the Motion Graphics gallery, i.e., in the animation design selection. By the time AIN.UA published its material, the video had garnered 214 appreciations and 4,511 views. For a bureau that had previously received recognition mainly on contest sites and in professional selections, this marked a notable step toward motion design. The mark is not an award: Behance does not run a competition but selects works for the platform's themed sections.
What the curated gallery means
Behance is a portfolio platform owned by Adobe. Designers, illustrators and motion artists publish their work there. The platform's editors and jury select the best projects and assemble them into themed galleries. Motion graphics is animated graphics: title sequences, commercials, credits, interface animation. The Adobe Motion Graphics Served gallery is precisely the selection that Alien made it into. A mark there means the work has passed the platform's internal selection and brings the project additional attention from the design community. AIN.UA described the event as follows:
“The video was chosen by the discerning jury of the Behance team and included in the 'Adobe motion graphics served' collection, where only the best of the best are published.”
For the studio, this was not a one-off success in Behance galleries, but the first mark of its kind in the motion direction, which immediately became the subject of a separate article in the Ukrainian press.
The second video and the promised film
Next, the bureau released The Transformer video featuring the Inkjet Drawer robot. According to Behance, the work appeared on the platform on October 20, 2014, and did not receive a curated mark. The publication is dated later than AIN.UA's October 17 material, where the video was already mentioned as released, so the date on Behance is given here as verified. Both videos show that in 2014 the studio was exploring animation as a standalone format, not just as an addition to websites.
The bureau's management, as AIN.UA wrote, promised to announce a full-length animated film in the first ten days of 2015. The future project was to be based on the same character with which the studio had launched its series of videos.
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