At the bottom of the homepage is a line that in professional circles is read as a letter of recommendation for the contractor: '© 2026. Obolon Corporation. Website developer — Sponge D&D.' The text is accompanied by a link to the studio's website. The site is entirely in Ukrainian, and this line looks as ordinary as the address in the header or the hotline number, though behind it lies a story almost a decade old.
A tender they were proud of
Website developer — Sponge D&D
Sponge was already a notable figure in the Ukrainian digital market at the time. The studio, which outside sources consider founded in 2009, by the mid-2010s was taking on major clients and regularly appearing in professional roundups. In an interview with the bureau for Dark Site of Marketing magazine in summer 2015, Obolon is named among tenders won at the national level. The conversation was published on 23 July 2015, and for the studio it was a weighty argument: behind the corporate website of a major producer stood not a one-off job but a state-scale project.
Precision is needed with dates here. The tender was won in 2015, as the interview confirms. The year the site itself was created is more often given in public materials as 2017, but the exact launch date has not been established. Therefore it is more accurate to speak of two stages: first the won tender, then the appearance of the site, which came roughly two years later.
Client in ratings
Obolon is on Tagline's client list for 2017. That same year the studio made the TOP-100 digital production of that rating and took 97th place. Tagline was then compiling ratings of design studios and production companies, and presence in the client list of a major brewing holding indicated that the market brought the studio not only startups and musicians.
That same year was the bureau's peak in the Runet Rating. In the creativity section for digital agencies for 2017, the studio took fourth place, published on 28 September. After that positions changed: in 2018 the bureau was 10th with 51 awards, and in 2019 it was 37th, with the same 51 awards. The CEO line of the 2019 rating lists Bohdan Hnatiuk, the studio's founder.
The international part of the portfolio looked no less notable. The bureau received accolades on Awwwards, including an Honorable Mention on 5 December 2013, and a series of CSS Winner distinctions, including Site of the Day for work in 2015 and 2016. The studio's Behance profile at the time of the last measurements had 387,933 views, 41,391 appreciations and 7,884 followers, and its 48 public works had 28 curator badges.
People and projects
Bohdan Hnatiuk is connected not only with Sponge. He was one of the creators of Looks.fm, a service written about in early 2015 by Korrespondent in blogs dated 13 February and 5 March. Looks.fm was a project at the intersection of design and music analytics, and in roundups of that time it was called one of the most notable startups of the year. Along with him, designer Serhiy Semernyov and product lead Kyrylo Solyar worked on the service; in 2016 Solyar was listed as executive director of Sponge D&D in IGate roundups.
For the Ukrainian market such a combination was typical. Small digital studios that won tenders simultaneously built their own products, entered international competitions and released services that gathered audiences. The studio had to prove quality not with one client but with portfolio, reviews and awards, so the line with the developer's name in the footer of a major site worked as proof of stability.
The studio continued to seek talent after its 2017 peak. In September 2018 a Sponge vacancy appeared on, where the company described itself as holding 'more than 60 awards in two years'. The last Behance curator badge for the bureau's work is dated 15 June 2018. Obolon's site has stood since then with the same wording in the footer, and the link still leads to the studio.
1
