The seminar took place on Thursday, from 19:00 to 21:00, at IQSpace, 9 Zhukovsky Street. Attendance was paid; a ticket cost 100 hryvnias. For Odesa programmers and designers, the meeting was a rare chance to hear from people who had built an international agency from scratch and, in the course of the work, made up the rules of the game themselves.
What the speakers discussed
The evening was moderated by the studio’s founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk. He described how the idea for the agency was born and how it got off the ground. Client work was covered by the agency’s executives; team lead Tymofii Kurshpetov spoke about technology, and Serhii Semernov about design. The lineup had a simple explanation: the program promised advice from four people responsible for different sides of a single project.
In the seminar description in the DOU calendar, the organizers promised advice from the founder, director, designer and programmer of the Sponge D&D creative agency. The announcement separately mentioned the studio’s business model, and this was perhaps the most practical promise for anyone thinking about starting their own agency:
we work almost 100% on inbound requests
In 2016, that answer to the question of where the money comes from looked unusual in itself. Most Ukrainian studios at the time lived off tenders and subcontracting, and a client stream of one’s own was considered a luxury.
The awards behind the agency’s story
The studio’s first serious mark was an Honorable Mention on Awwwards, one of the main platforms for evaluating web design, where work is assessed by juries and the professional community. That happened on 5 December 2013. In February 2014, Sponge appeared in Splashnology’s “30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration” selection, taking 23rd place out of thirty. Later, its work regularly earned marks on CSS Winner, a platform that rates sites on design and implementation. In 2016 the studio received a SOTD, or “site of the day,” for a project for Furgoneta, and on 29 March of that year the agency’s work for Business Logic Group was included in a Best of Behance selection. Behance, owned by Adobe, serves as a portfolio for designers, and inclusion in its best work is considered recognition there.
In the Tagline ranking of design studios for 2016, the agency took 67th place, sharing it with Saatchi & Saatchi. For a studio from Odesa, the proximity to one of the world’s largest advertising networks was a telling fact, though the ranking itself judges more by volume and visibility than by artistic results.
Looks.fm and other projects
Alongside client work, the team took part in launching the Looks.fm service. Bohdan Hnatiuk and Serhii Semernov were among its creators, and Kyrylo Soliar led the product and in 2016 was listed in IGate selections as executive director of Sponge D&D. In February and March 2015, Korrespondent blogs wrote about Looks.fm, and later Kyrylo Soliar published a column in the Goethe-Institut magazine. That experience explains why product projects were discussed at the seminar on a par with client work.
The client roster, too, was not limited to commercial websites. In 2017, the website of the singer Artem Pyvovarov received marks from CSS Winner and Awwwards on 23 and 25 August, and in September of that year the agency took fourth place in the ranking of creative digital agencies of the Russian-language internet. A year later, on 12 July 2018, Serhii Semernov gave a design master class at the Hillel school.
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