The digital agency creativity ranking is published by the Rating Runeta project, owned by CMS Magazine. The logic is simple: an agency earns points for prizes from professional competitions, and its final place depends on how noticeable its work is against the other participants. For studios that create websites, interfaces, and motion design, such a ranking becomes one of the few public ways to show results.
Competition wins from 2015–2017 brought Sponge D&D to fourth place in the digital agency creativity ranking
In 2017, the studio scored 23.32 points, and its 47 awards were distributed across four platforms. Most of the awards came from CSS Design Awards and Behance: sixteen each. Awwwards, the international website competition that evaluates design, interactivity, and technical execution, brought ten prizes, while the Russian Golden Site brought five. The ranking results were reprinted by the business blog Sostav and AllAdvertising, so the numbers quickly spread beyond the ranking itself.
What Stood Behind the Awards
The prizes were made up of work released over several years. The animated video with Madonna appeared on Behance on June 30, 2015, and in September of that year Sostav included it in its selection “Best Projects of the Summer from Behance” in the motion design section. Behance, the portfolio platform owned by Adobe, uses Best of Behance marks, and in March 2016 the Business Logic Group project received such a mark. In September 2017, the Helicopter View project received Best of Behance.
Web competitions worked at the same rhythm. On February 4, 2016, CSS Winner selected the Furgoneta website as Site of the Day, that is, the best work of the day. In August 2017, the website of singer Artyom Pivovarov received two recognitions at once: Site of the Day on CSS Winner on August 23 and Site of the Day on Awwwards with a Developer mark on August 25. Before the ranking was released, the bureau had managed to show one of its most notable series of works for the entire period.
What Happened Next
The studio's reputation in those years was built not only on commissioned websites. Bogdan Gnatyuk, the founder of the bureau, was one of the creators of Looks.fm, and in February and March 2015 Korrespondent wrote about the project. Kirill Solyar managed Looks.fm as product manager, and that experience was also part of the portfolio of the team that worked on websites and interfaces.
In 2016, the bureau entered the Tagline design studio ranking at 67th place, and in the TOP-100 digital production for 2017 it took 97th. In the 2018 Rating Runeta, Sponge rose to tenth place, scoring 12.25 points and 51 awards. The position dropped by six places compared to 2017, while the number of awards increased by four.
In 2019, the studio took 37th place with a score of 4.59 and the same 51 awards. In the manager line, the ranking listed Bogdan Gnatyuk. In 2016, the studio was not listed in the ranking, and in 2020 and 2021 it was not in it.
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