The lecture's title sounded more like a working manual than a flashy announcement. It was this that Sergey Semernyov, art director of Sponge D&D, presented on 12 July 2018 at 19:00. The venue was in Odesa, at 22 Kanatna Street, on the second floor, in the premises of the Hillel computer school.
For the local IT audience, this format was familiar. Admission was free but required prior registration. The announcement was published by the DOU calendar, a Ukrainian resource for IT professionals with job listings and an events guide. However, the initiator of the meeting was the Hillel school, which invited the attendees. As follows from the announcement text, DOU was merely a platform for the notice.
“The Hillel computer school invites you to a masterclass…”
Semernyov is known in the Ukrainian digital scene as one of the creators of Looks.fm and the SPONGE STORE shop. In early 2015, Korrespondent covered Looks.fm: in the publication's blogs of 13 February and 5 March 2015, the project was described as one of the most notable novelties of those months. Along with Semernyov, Bohdan Hnatiuk, the founder of Sponge, worked on the project and later continued developing the service.
What stood behind the studio
External sources date the founding of Sponge to 2009. The date 22 November 2009 is cited by CSS Winner, one of the oldest web design catalogs. The studio quickly came to the attention of international resources: in December 2013 its website received an Honorable Mention on Awwwards, and in February 2014 Splashnology included the bureau's work in a selection of 30 dark web designs, where Sponge took 23rd place.
In the summer of 2015, a series of Site of the Day marks appeared on several platforms at once: CSSDA, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSS Winner, BestCSS, CSSReel and Awwwards. For the American version of the site, One Page Love and CSSDA Special Kudos were added. The work for singer Madonna appeared on Behance, and in September 2015 Sostav included it in a selection of the best projects of the summer from Behance in the motion design section.
The studio continued to work for Behance later as well. According to the spongedigital profile, the last curated mark in 2018 fell on 15 June. At the same time, Sponge continued to participate in industry ratings. In the Runet Rating for creativity of digital agencies in 2017, the bureau was placed fourth, and in 2018 it took tenth place with 51 awards.
The masterclass amid hiring
The lecture in Odesa coincided with an active search for staff. On 6 September 2018, a Sponge vacancy appeared on, in which the studio described itself as having “more than 60 awards in two years.” The public presentation of the art director's experience at Hillel essentially served the same purpose: to show how the bureau solves user scenarios in media products and to attract the attention of designers.
The topic itself—finding inspiration and repeatable UI/UX solutions for mass media—matched what the studio had been doing in the 2010s. News portals, magazine sites and media services required fast and clear interfaces, so the experience of dozens of such projects was in demand among local designers and developers.
Subsequent history
In the 2019 Runet Rating, Sponge dropped to 37th place, while the number of awards remained the same, 51. In the line about the bureau's head in that rating, Bohdan Hnatiuk was listed, and from that point on he appeared as the studio's CEO.
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