Most people know Sponge for its websites and web interfaces, but the studio also had a second line that looked no less confident in 2015: motion design and illustration. Its showcase is on ArtStation, a platform where artists, concept artists and animators display portfolio work. The account handle "Sponge Digital & Design" sets the frame for the entire collection:
Motion design & Illustration
The collection and its timeline
The collection contains 21 projects. Among them are Madonna, Heads, The Animated Transformer, Alien, Dragon, Port, Zomby, the Geeks Empire promo, Inkjet Drawer, Lord's Supper, Triptych, Locust and Chernomor. There are also works listed as series: Animation "Alien", Alien & Winnie-the-Pooh, Kado: Avengers. All projects were published on ArtStation between 16 June and 13 November 2015.
The platform posts all date from one year, but the works themselves were created earlier. Alien and The Animated Transformer appeared in 2014, confirmed by earlier publications: the Alien video was posted on Behance on 20 August 2014, and on 2 September that year it received a Motion Graphics badge, which Adobe awards to selections on its platform. Thus the 2015 collection gathered works created over several seasons, not just in recent months.
For readers unfamiliar with these platforms: on Behance artists maintain portfolios, and instead of likes, users give appreciations. Behance curated galleries function as recommendation feeds, and being featured there noticeably boosts views.
Heads and Madonna: what the platforms noticed
The sculptural work Heads was published on ArtStation on 3 August 2015, tagged Concept Art and sculpting, and garnered 475 views. Two days later, on 5 August, it was posted on Behance, where it collected 1,030 appreciations. That is the strongest figure in the entire collection and, in essence, the main argument that the studio's sculptural and conceptual approach found an audience beyond Ukraine.
Madonna appeared on Behance on 30 June 2015. The work was one of the highlights in the "Best Projects of Summer from Behance" selection, published by Sostav on 21 September 2015. In the motion design section, Madonna was among those recognized, and for a studio that was increasingly appearing in website rankings at the time, this was a notable sign of recognition in another genre.
Motion and websites under one roof
The illustration and animation line ran parallel to web projects that collected their own awards in 2015. From 24 May to 14 August 2015, the bureau's websites received a series of SOTD and similar marks on CSSDA, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSS Winner, BestCSS, CSSReel and Awwwards, and for the American version also on One Page Love and BestCSS. On 14 August 2015, CSSDA awarded the American site a Special Kudos mark.
In October 2014, AIN.UA published a piece titled "What Dynamic Design Can Do: The Example of Creative Bureau Sponge," meaning dynamic graphics were already considered the studio's calling card. Also at the end of 2014, a Behance account appeared that continued the collection, and the studio itself was visible in the Ukrainian professional press.
Bohdan Hnatiuk, founder of Sponge, was involved in the Looks.fm project during those same months, which Korrespondent wrote about on 13 February and 5 March 2015. This is a reminder that in 2015 the studio worked on several fronts: websites, animation, illustration and product projects all ran simultaneously.
What came next
The ArtStation collection remains one of the most cohesive snapshots of the bureau's illustration line. Shortly after its publications, the Sostav selection of 21 September 2015 cited Madonna as one of the best motion projects of the summer, and that date became the last confirmed recognition of the 2015 works in open sources.
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