Style Whisperer doesn't sell people clothes; it sells them the knack of choosing them. A business like that runs on trust, and its website has to work at once as a shop window, as expert copy and as a clear route to an order. Those are precisely the criteria — beyond the visual side — by which work is judged on the international platforms where the project earned its honours.
Three awards in a single autumn
The first was Awwwards, one of the best-known international platforms for web design. Its jury selects work for the daily Site of the Day shortlist and also singles out projects with the title Honorable Mention. The Style Whisperer site received such a mention on 13 September 2017.
Three days later, on 16 September, the project was given Star status at CSS Winner. This is a gallery of sites chosen by editors for quality of execution, and the Star title goes to the stronger among them. Five days after that, in September 2017, the work took Special Kudos at CSS Design Awards with a score of 7.63. Special Kudos is awarded to sites the jury singles out beyond the main nominations.
Autumn 2017 was an especially busy stretch for the bureau. In August the studio collected several awards at once for a restaurant and manufacturing client's site: CSS Winner Site of the Day on 23 August, Special Kudos at CSS Design Awards the next day, and Site of the Day from Awwwards together with a development award on 25 August. Earlier in 2017 the bureau's projects were also noted in other international galleries, including CSS Winner Site of the Day for BizzGrid on 17 January and for M1 Club Hotel on 4 February.
A place in the Runet Rating
The Runet Rating is an annual review of Russian-language internet agencies, with creativity assessed separately. In 2017 Sponge took fourth place in that category with 23.32 points. It was the bureau's highest result in the category over the period that can be traced through the rating's public data.
A year earlier the position had been more modest: in 2016 the bureau shared 11th place for creativity. In 2018 Sponge slipped to 10th place with 12.25 points, and in 2019 to 37th with 4.59 points. The decline coincided with a general drift of studios away from public competitions, which in 2017 were still the main way to make a name beyond Ukraine.
The team and earlier wins
The bureau's founder remains Bohdan Hnatiuk. In the Runet Rating profile for 2019–2021 he is listed as CEO, while in 2014 the studio was represented in an Innabits interview by executive director Kyrylo Soliar. Serhii Semernov started as lead designer and director of SPONGE STORE, and later became art director of Sponge D&D, as DOU reported in 2018.
Work on websites and brand identity had been going on at the studio before that. In 2015 the Sponge site took first place in the Digital Agency Website category at the Golden Site 2015 awards, and at UD 2015 the Sponge D&D site won the Best of B-1 category. That same year the bureau's first awards appeared in the CSS Winner galleries with the studio's own site, including Site of the Day on 13 June.
In September 2020 Sponge's profile on rose to 4th place for Odesa, and in January 2021 to 2nd.
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