Noupe publishes a magazine about design and internet projects that regularly features collections of work with short analyses. The "World of Design" series is conceived as a look at the profession by country: each issue showcases a national school through the work of bureaus that stand out within it. The first issue was dedicated to Ukraine and came out in September 2014, when the country was living under the pressure of a political crisis and war in the east, while Ukrainian studios continued to work for clients and reach international platforms.
The reference Cyclopedia of Ukrainian Design records Sponge as a studio that made it into this issue. Exactly what the bureau showed in the selection and how its work is described there is not recounted in this text, so the focus is on the very fact of inclusion in the overview of the national school, not on the details of the publication.
The Odesa bureau before the overview
By autumn 2014, Sponge already had international marks. In December 2013, the bureau's website received an Honorable Mention at Awwwards, a platform where websites are judged on design, usability, and creativity. This is not the top award, but for a studio from Ukraine it meant that its work was being seen far beyond the country's borders.
In February 2014, the Splashnology blog published a collection titled "30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration," dedicated to dark web design. Sponge was included at number 23 out of thirty. In May of the same year, the bureau submitted seven works to the 15th Kyiv International Advertising Festival (KIАF). The studio received no awards from the festival, but participation showed that Sponge was active not only on web platforms but also in advertising competitions.
In summer 2014, a video called Alien appeared on Behance, the portfolio service owned by Adobe. At the end of August and beginning of September, the work was featured in the Motion Graphics section that Adobe highlights in its collection. Around the same time, the Estetico.me website and the logo for "Pershyi Miskyi" were recognized in the Ukrainian Design 2014 competition. For the bureau, this was a series of recognitions across different genres: from websites to animation and corporate identity.
What happened next
A month after the overview was published, on October 17, 2014, the Ukrainian publication AIN.UA ran a text about the bureau under the headline "What Dynamic Design Can Do: The Example of Creative Bureau Sponge." The publication cemented the studio's reputation as one of the notable Ukrainian internet bureaus, precisely in the year when attention to local design grew thanks to foreign publications.
Bohdan Hnatiuk, the founder of Sponge, was also involved in the creation of Looks.fm during these years, which the Korrespondent blog wrote about in February and March 2015. The project's head and product manager was Kyrylo Soliar, who later wrote a column for the Goethe-Institut magazine. Soliar himself is named in the IGate 2016 listings as executive director of Sponge D&D, showing how the teams of the bureau and projects overlapped.
The studio's work continued to appear in international collections in 2015 as well. Between May 24 and August 14, Sponge's websites received a series of Site of the Day marks at CSS Winner, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSSDA, BestCSS, and CSSReel, and on August 8, 2015, the site was recognized as Site of the Day at Awwwards.
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