According to the bureau, the company was founded by Bohdan Hnatiuk in late 2009. External sources give a more precise date: in the CSS Winner database, the founding is recorded as November 22, 2009. Reference materials mention an earlier name, Layner, which in Cyclopedia is linked to the period before the renaming to Sponge in 2007; however, all external sources date the bureau's founding to 2009, and this version should be considered verified. In the interview, the bureau said that the co-founder joined the company a few months after its opening, mainly in a sales capacity.
Hnatiuk is also known outside the studio. He is one of the creators of Looks.fm, which Korrespondent wrote about in early 2015. The service's head and product manager was Kyrylo Soliar, who was later listed as executive director of Sponge D&D in IGate roundups. Such intertwining of projects is typical of the Ukrainian digital market of that time: small teams ran their own products while also taking orders for websites and identity work.
A website that collects marks
By the time of the interview—two months after launch—the bureau's new website had received five "site of the day" marks. The SOTD (Site of the Day) mark is awarded daily on aggregators such as CSS Winner, CSS Nectar, CSSDA, BestCSS, and CSS Light, as well as on Awwwards. According to the interview, the site's traffic grew roughly fivefold, and it generates three to five inquiries per day.
Attention to the bureau's work came not only from the website. The case study for the new site was published on Behance on May 8, 2015, and between May 24 and August 14, 2015, the site received marks on several platforms, including Awwwards, where the mark is dated August 8. Behance, Adobe's portfolio service, had been used by the studio since August 23, 2013, when the spongedigital profile was created. The bureau's projects had appeared in roundups on this platform before: for example, in 2014 the Alien video was featured in the Motion Graphics category.
Boldness as a business tool
The corporate identity with Masonic symbolism, a set square and compass, appeared in 2013. That same year, the studio received an Honorable Mention on Awwwards dated December 5, 2013. In early 2014, Splashnology included the bureau's site in its "30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration" roundup, where it placed 23rd out of 30. The bureau explains its provocative style pragmatically: according to them, "it really works and brings profit." They also add that their work is not built around self-expression:
we are not engaged in creativity in its pure form, we solve specific business tasks
Among the bureau's clients, they named Obolon, which according to the company is one of the national-level tenders they won. In addition to Ukraine, the bureau receives projects from Germany and Japan, participates in tenders in Kazakhstan, has opened a representative office in New Jersey, and plans to enter the Azerbaijani market. According to the bureau's reference, over its time in the market the company has completed more than 600 projects for more than 100 clients.
Not everything went smoothly. In the interview, the bureau admitted that in early 2015 two clients with a combined budget of $150,000 pulled out. The company explains such losses by the fact that tenders remain an unstable source of revenue, so the order portfolio must be constantly replenished.
Non-commercial projects and film
The bureau's non-commercial projects are grouped under the mini-holding ornament.media. It includes Geeks Empire and Estetico. The website estetico.me received a Ukrainian Design award in 2014, and in the same year the logo for "Pershyi Miskyi" received the same award. The bureau's own full-length animation project Chimera is, according to them, on the horizon, but no launch dates were mentioned in the interview.
The story is not yet over: on February 4, 2016, CSS Winner awarded site of the day status to the Furgoneta project created by the studio, and on the same day Korrespondent published a piece about it.
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