CSS Winner is one of the international showcases of contemporary web design. Sites here are not chosen on the basis of popularity or advertising budget: each entry is assessed by a jury across several criteria, and the best receive the Site of the Day mark. Scores are given in four areas: design, functionality, usability and content. The final score is made up of these, and to be among the winners an entry usually needs a rating noticeably above average.
The jury described the Kvadrat promo site briefly and precisely: “Promo web-site of the Kvadrat construction company”. It is an advertising site for a construction company, meaning its task is not to lead the client through a complex transaction but to explain across a few screens what the company does and to inspire trust in it. That is precisely why the content score, 7.5, was the only one slightly below the others. Design, functionality and usability each received 7.6, and the overall score matched them.
Three awards in two months
Two days after the win on CSS Winner, on 21 December, the project received Special Kudos on CSS Design Awards. This is a separate mark from the CSS Design Awards competition, awarded to works that stood out to the jury beyond the main ranking. The score here was also 7.60, matching the result on CSS Winner. For a site that launched in December, such a sequence looks rare: identical scores on different platforms indicate that different groups of experts saw the same strengths in the work.
In February 2016 the site received Site of the Day on CSS Nectar, another international competition with its own gallery and jury. This award was the third in a short period and closed the chain that began in December.
The studio’s year in numbers
The Kvadrat promo site took its place alongside the awards that the Sponge bureau collected in 2015. The studio’s own site went through several competitions in succession over the year: on 24 May it received Website of the Day on CSSDA with a score of 7.80, on 29 May it became Site of the Day on CSS Nectar, on 3 June it received Font of the Day on CSS Light, on 13 June it became Site of the Day on CSS Winner with a score of 7.5, on 20 July it was noted on BestCSS, on 27 July it became a Winner on CSSReel, and on 8 August it received Site of the Day on Awwwards with a score of 7.03. These dates show that in spring and summer 2015 the bureau was active on several platforms at once, and Kvadrat’s December win continued this line.
Another recognition of the year was the Golden Site 2015 award, presented in Moscow on 22 October. The Sponge site took first place in the Digital Agency Website category. In the same award, Foundator was second in financial media, and Estetico third in the category of educational and blog sites. The developer ranking based on the award’s results placed the studio at 17th–19th with 9 points.
Competitors and neighbours in the rankings
For comparison: in 2015 other Ukrainian teams also performed notably in the same competitions. Geeks Empire received CSS Light on 23 June and a CSS Winner nomination on 29 June. Foundator was among the CSS Winner nominees on 11 July and received BestCSS Site of the Day on 21 July. The works of these studios also belonged to the same ranks of the best sites as the Kvadrat promo site.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, other professional events were taking place. At the UD 2015 competition, the Sponge D&D site received Best of B-1, and the KTK logo was noted as Best of C-I-2. Such awards do not replace international recognition, but together with it they form a picture of how Ukrainian agencies announced themselves beyond the country’s borders. The bureau’s founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk, continued in 2015 to develop the studio, which employed designers, developers and project managers.
The result of 2015 for Kvadrat looks like this: a site created for a construction company found itself within a week alongside works usually associated with IT studios and media brands, and two months later received another international mark. Ahead lay February 2016 and the Site of the Day on CSS Nectar, which became the final link in this chain of awards.
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