Behance belongs to Adobe and serves as a showcase for designers, illustrators, photographers and studios. Creators upload their work themselves, while the platform's editors select the best and feature them in dedicated collections. The Best of Behance mark is awarded in exactly this way, and for creators it is one of the most visible ways to catch the eye of the professional community.
The Sponge work was a website concept for Business Logic Group—that is, a visual model of the future site that designers show to the client and the public before development begins. Such projects are viewed not only by clients but also by fellow professionals. The 2,531 appreciations and more than 43 thousand views indicate genuine interest, while 141 comments mean the work was not merely scrolled through but discussed.
The studio and its path on Behance
By 2016, Sponge had been operating for about seven years. According to most external sources, the bureau was founded in 2009, and one of the studio's faces remains its founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk, who spoke at DOU in 2016 and is known as one of the creators of the Looks.fm service.
The bureau's Behance profile was set up on 23 August 2013, and since then its works have regularly appeared in the platform's collections. The motion project Madonna in summer 2015 was included in the selection Best Projects of Summer from Behance, which Sostav wrote about on 21 September that same year. Even earlier, on 17 October 2014, AIN.UA published the piece What Dynamic Design Can Do: The Example of Creative Bureau Sponge, which examined the studio's creative approach through specific works.
What the marks provided
Behance curatorial marks were not the only way to draw attention to the bureau's work. The CSS Winner catalogue selects Site of the Day. On 4 February 2016, the Furgoneta website received this mark; on 6 March of the same year, Carts Guru became Site of the Day; and on 10 July 2016, the mark went to Trendon store.
For a studio that works on commission, such marks are useful in two directions at once. They bring the work to an international audience and provide material for presentations to potential clients. Around the same time, in 2016, the Tagline design studio ranking placed Sponge at 67th, sharing the position with Saatchi & Saatchi.
Best of Behance
The very fact of being featured in the Best of Behance collection works differently from a ranking. It is tied to a specific work that can be opened, browsed and compared with other projects, and therefore it is clear why it was chosen.
What happened next
On 20 October 2016, an announcement appeared in the DOU calendar for Sponge's seminar How to Start Your Own Web Studio. Thus a studio that had spent the year receiving marks for client websites moved on to discussing how the business itself—the one these websites are connected to—is structured.
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