Sponge is considered a studio that grew out of web development. The company was founded in November 2009, and CSS Winner gives the exact date as November 22, 2009. In its early years, the bureau made websites and regularly received recognition from professional resources: the studio's sites were featured in selections by CSS Winner, CSS Nectar, and Awwwards, and on December 5, 2013, Awwwards honored the bureau's work with an Honorable Mention award.
Alien and the Behance Curated Gallery
The shift to animation became noticeable as early as 2014. The Alien video was published on Behance in late August 2014, and on September 2 the work appeared in the Motion Graphics category, which the service highlights in its own Adobe Motion Graphics Served selection. Behance is owned by Adobe and serves as the largest platform where designers publish portfolios and curators select the best works. Being included in such a selection means that the work will be seen by hundreds of thousands of professionals, not just the bureau's clients.
In October 2014, AIN.UA published a piece headlined "What Dynamic Design Can Do: The Example of Creative Bureau Sponge." The editors chose the studio as an example of how animation changes the conventional perception of websites and branding. By that time, the studio had already made a name for itself in Ukrainian competitions: in 2014, Ukrainian Design recognized the Estetico.me website and the logo for "Pervy Gorodskoy."
Madonna and the Top Award from Ukrainian Design
The main motion project of 2015 was the Madonna video. In Ukrainian Design, the annual Ukrainian design competition, the work received the highest award. A few months later, on June 30, the video appeared on Behance, and on September 21, 2015, Sostav included it in its review "Best Projects of the Summer from Behance" as one of the best works in motion design. For the bureau, this was confirmation: animation had ceased to be an experiment and had become a full-fledged service.
In parallel, the studio worked on products that went far beyond the agency business. One of the creators of the Looks.fm service, Bohdan Hnatiuk, the founder of Sponge, participated in a project that Korrespondent covered in February and March 2015. The head and product manager of Looks.fm was Kyrylo Soliar, who later wrote a column about the project for the Goethe-Institut magazine. As Forbes wrote, Looks.fm became the discovery of 2015, and this success is directly linked to the fact that Sponge knew how to do both the product and its visual part.
Ratings and New Challenges
In 2016, Bohdan Hnatiuk was among the speakers at a seminar on creating a web studio, announced by DOU. In agency rankings, the studio held its ground confidently: in the 2017 Runet Rating, Sponge's creativity as a digital agency was rated fourth; in 2018, the bureau rose to tenth place and received 51 awards. In 2018, the studio was looking for employees and described itself in a job posting on as follows: "more than 60 awards in two years."
In 2019, the Runet Rating placed Sponge in 37th place with 51 awards, and in the line about the studio's leadership, Bohdan Hnatiuk was listed as CEO. Thus, over five years, the bureau went from websites recognized on industry resources to motion projects featured in Behance selections, and to a place in the national ranking of creative agencies.
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