The ranking results became known from a post in the Proactivity Group business blog (Workspace), hosted on the Sostav.ru platform. The ranking itself was compiled by Rating Runeta, and its table is the primary source of the figures. Studios that had at least one win in one of six competitions were invited to participate: Golden Site, Rating Runeta, FWA, Awwwards, CSS Design Awards, or Webby.
To a non-specialist, these names sound alike, but they are structured differently. Golden Site and Rating Runeta focus on the Russian-language internet. Awwwards and CSS Design Awards are international platforms where a jury selects the best sites and chooses the Site of the Day from among them. FWA, Favourite Website Awards, traditionally recognizes interactive and experimental projects, while Webby is an American internet award. A win in any of these competitions makes a studio noticeable to colleagues, and the accumulated marks add up to the very score on which the table is built.
What the score was made of
Sponge had 47 awards to its name. Most came from two competitions: sixteen awards each on CSS Design Awards and Behance. Awwwards accounted for ten awards, and Golden Site for five. The total was 23.32 points, and the place in the table was fourth.
Not only wins were counted. The ranking took into account Honorable Mention on Awwwards, Special Kudos on CSS Design Awards, Honoree on Webby, as well as Behance marks. Behance is an Adobe platform where designers publish their work and users rate it. Being featured in the platform's editorial selection Featured and in thematic galleries also counted. For a studio that mostly makes websites and interfaces, Behance proved an important field: here the work is seen not by clients but by fellow designers, and from here come new inquiries and new connections.
The picture across the entire table looks uneven. The TOP-100 ranking included 44 studios from Moscow and 9 from Saint Petersburg. To get into the top ten against such a background meant overtaking the main capital studios, which have more resources and more clients from big business.
The path to the top five
The studio had been working toward this result for several years. In May 2014, Sponge participated in the 15th Competition of Young Films and Advertising (KMF R) with seven entries but received no awards. Two years later things went differently: in late spring and summer 2015, the bureau's work appeared in series of Site of the Day and similar marks on CSS Design Awards, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSS Winner, BestCSS, and CSSReel, and on August 8, 2015, a site received Site of the Day on Awwwards. For the American version of one project in August of the same year, a Special Kudos mark on CSS Design Awards was added.
In parallel, the bureau worked on projects that went beyond corporate websites. The Looks.fm service, created by a team that included studio founder Bogdan Gnatyuk, was discussed in Korrespondent blogs in early 2015. In 2016, the studio entered Tagline's design studio ranking at number 67, and in its digital production ranking later took 97th place. A separate peak came in summer 2017: in August, singer Artyom Pivovarov's website received Site of the Day on CSS Winner and Site of the Day on Awwwards, and on September 25, three days before the ranking was published, the Helicopter View work was included in the Best of Behance selection.
What happened next
In 2018, the studio stayed in the ranking, taking tenth place with 51 awards. In September of the same year, in a job posting on the Ukrainian resource, the bureau described itself as a studio with more than 60 awards over two years. In July 2018, a master class by designer Sergey Semernyov, one of the creators of Looks.fm, was held at the Hillel school.
In 2019, the ranking dropped the studio to 37th place, although the number of awards remained the same — 51. The leader line that year listed Bogdan Gnatyuk.
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