The 'IT Personalities of Ukraine' roundups on IGate, the Ukrainian IT portal, brought together the executives who shape the face of the domestic industry. In January, February and March 2016, Kyrylo Solyar, executive director of the Odesa-based studio Sponge D&D, appeared in them regularly. For a digital agency from Odesa, such company was rare: next to his name stood people who headed companies known to millions of Ukrainian users.
Kyrylo Solyar worked at the studio and was simultaneously product manager of Looks.fm, a service discussed by Ukrainian media in 2015. Korrespondent blogs about Looks.fm were published on 13 February and 5 March 2015, and Forbes at the beginning of that year called the project a discovery of 2015. Solyar was one of those behind the product, so his inclusion in IGate's roundups looked like a logical continuation of that work.
Among Solyar's neighbours in the roundups were heads of the market's biggest players. Petro Chernyshov led Kyivstar, the country's most popular mobile operator. Mykola Palienko was CEO of, one of Ukraine's main marketplaces. Andriy Khvetkevych headed, and Danylo Tonkopiy founded. The very fact that IGate's editors placed these surnames in one row speaks to how, in 2016, they saw the place of a design studio in the wider space of the Ukrainian internet.
A studio that kept its standard through awards
By 2016, Sponge D&D had a series of international distinctions behind it. The studio's founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk, built the agency on a combination of design and development, and it was for this work that the studio was noticed outside Ukraine. The agency's website received an Honorable Mention on Awwwards, a platform that evaluates web design worldwide, on 5 December 2013. Awwwards also awards a daily Site of the Day, and in August 2015 the agency's site received it among other honours of that season.
In 2016, the studio's work also came to the attention of CSS Winner, a gallery that recognises the best websites. There Sponge received Site of the Day for the Carts Guru project on 6 March 2016, and on 10 July of the same year for Trendon store. Another notable distinction came from Behance, the portfolio platform owned by Adobe: on 29 March 2016, a project for Business Logic Group was included in the Best of Behance selection.
Attention to the studio was reinforced by professional rankings. In the Tagline design studio ranking for 2016, Sponge took 67th place, sharing it with Saatchi & Saatchi. Such a result in the same list as an international advertising network showed that the Ukrainian agency operated in the same weight category as large agencies, even though its team remained small.
The team and the next step
Around Solyar and Hnatiuk worked a team that determined the product and visual sides of projects. Serhiy Semernyov was responsible for design, and Tymofiy Kurshpetov was team lead and programmer. Such a lineup allowed the studio to handle both websites for brands and its own products, like Looks.fm, while maintaining control over the full work cycle.
IGate's roundups in early 2016 recorded what the studio had already done. The agency's next public step was about passing on experience. On 20 October 2016, Sponge held a seminar, 'How to Open Your Own Web Studio', announced in the DOU calendar. For the Odesa agency, which over several years had gone from websites and awards to the status of a notable industry player, this was a natural continuation of the work that IGate's editors had highlighted at the beginning of the year.
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