The client and the brief
Simbrella operates in the mobile communications market. According to its Behance description, the company has existed since 2005 and builds products for mobile operators around the world. A business like this rarely speaks to a broad audience, so the corporate site here has one main job: to explain quickly what the company does and to show its calibre to anyone opening the page for the first time. For Simbrella, the studio Sponge carried out a full rebrand, and the site became its visible part.
The work appeared on Behance on 28 November 2016. Two days later, on 30 November, the site received an Honorable Mention at Awwwards, the international web design competition where sites are judged by a jury and the community on design, usability and creativity. An honourable mention ranks below the competition's top awards, but for the studio it was already recognition on an international level. A second mark came on 11 December 2016: the site received a star from CSS Winner, one of the galleries of the best sites, which admits work selected for its visual and technical standard.
What 2,839 appreciations mean
Behance, Adobe's portfolio portal, is built so that work enters themed galleries, with curators choosing for themselves what to show. The User Interface mark of 8 October 2017 was exactly that kind of choice. Appreciations on Behance are essentially likes, and their number shows how much the portal's audience liked the work. Simbrella's site has 2,839 appreciations, 26,441 views and 142 comments. By number of appreciations it is the studio's most popular public project on Behance.
For Sponge the portal has long been a working tool. In September 2015 Sostav included the Madonna motion design piece in its roundup "The best projects of the summer from Behance", and on 29 March 2016 Behance selected a piece for Business Logic Group. On 25 September 2017, two weeks before the Simbrella mark, Helicopter View was among the best. Regular curatorial marks show that the studio consistently comes to the portal editors' attention rather than receiving it only now and then.
The studio that collects marks
Sponge's CSS Winner profile by the time of these events counted 21 works: 9 SOTD marks (Site of the Day), 6 Star and 6 Nominee. The Carts Guru and Trendon store sites took SOTD in March and July 2016, and Hijina became a nominee on 14 February 2017. Simbrella's site fitted into this line and combines gallery recognition with the attention of Behance users.
The studio's scale is visible in the ratings too. In the Runet rating for creativity among digital agencies for 2017, published on 28 September, Sponge took fourth place. In 2017 Tagline included the studio in its TOP-100 digital production, where it landed in 97th place. The studio's founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk, is known beyond the bureau as well: in 2015 he was one of the creators of the Looks.fm service, which Korrespondent wrote about in February and March of that year.
What came next
The marks continued after Simbrella. On 15 June 2018 Behance selected the OneClickMoney project — the studio's latest curatorial mark in the known list. In the same year, 2018, the Runet Rating placed Sponge 10th with 51 awards. In 2019 the studio took 37th place in the same rating, with Bohdan Hnatiuk listed as CEO.
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