Behance is a portfolio platform supported by Adobe. Here artists, designers and studios publish finished works, receive ratings and get featured in thematic collections curated by the platform's editors. For a design bureau, such a showcase has long been a way to make a name beyond its home market. Sponge's Behance profile appeared on 23 August 2013, and by 2015 the studio already had experience of being featured in curated galleries.
The summer 2015 Behance Russia selection was straightforward. In each category the jury chose five works, and this selection was called 'TOP5'. A place in motion design went to the Madonna video, which the studio posted on Behance on 30 June 2015. Sostav published the results under the headline 'The Best Projects of Summer from Behance', and the same selection mentions Sponge Digital & Design as the author of the work.
For the studio, this was not its first experience of animation on Behance. Back in 2014, the Alien video received a feature in the Motion Graphics gallery curated by the platform. At the same time, the bureau was working on websites and brand identities for clients from Ukraine, and motion remained one of the areas where the team demonstrated its craft alongside layout and interface design.
In the summer of 2015, the main flow of recognition came through websites. From 24 May to 14 August, a series of 'Site of the Day' marks and similar awards appeared on CSSDA, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSS Winner, BestCSS and CSSReel. On 8 August 2015, Awwwards recognised the bureau's work, and on 14 August CSSDA gave a Special Kudos award for the American version of the site. In the same period, a case study of the bureau's new website appeared on Behance, published on 8 May. Madonna stood out in this series because it belonged to a different discipline and was selected in a competition where works by various authors were compared within a single category.
What the selection brought and what followed
The Behance Russia selection establishes a work's place among the best projects of the season but offers no financial or professional guarantees. The jury recognises specific works, not the studio as a whole, so the value of being included is determined by how widely the selection circulates in the professional community. Sostav, reprinting the results, did so in the format of a review of the best projects of the summer, and it was precisely this format that allowed the work to come to the market's attention.
A separate story on Behance happened later. The platform's curators included Madonna in the Motion Graphics gallery, which in the Russian localization is called 'Animation Design'. The mark appeared on 22 June 2016, that is, after the summer selection. This is an independent fact of curatorial attention, not a continuation of the 2015 results, and in any account of Madonna they should be kept separate.
The team and the context
In 2015, Sponge was working under the leadership of Bohdan Hnatiuk, the bureau's founder, who was at the same time one of the creators of the Looks.fm service. The project received attention from Korrespondent in February and March 2015, and Forbes at the beginning of 2015 called Looks.fm the discovery of the year. Work on Madonna was carried out by the same team that was simultaneously handling websites, interfaces and product projects, and this combination of tasks remained characteristic of the studio throughout the years.
It is also important that design bureaus in Ukraine in 2015 worked in conditions where international platforms such as Behance, Awwwards and CSS galleries were the main way to gain recognition beyond the domestic market. For Ukrainian studios, this meant competing not with neighbours but with teams from various countries, and a place in the top five of Behance Russia showed that the work was meeting this competition on equal terms.
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