The Kyiv Advertising Festival divides competition works into several blocks. One of them, Digital & Mobile, accepts websites, mobile applications and other digital projects. Sponge entered seven submissions: four in the Design category and three in Digital & Mobile. The results published by the organisers showed that none of them received an award.
Points and thresholds
Within Digital & Mobile, works are divided into commercial websites (G-1) and non-commercial digital projects (G-2). The jury assigns points, and these determine the shortlist and bronze. For commercial websites, the shortlist started at 61 points, bronze at 67. For non-commercial projects, bronze started at 68 points, and no shortlist was awarded at all.
The bureau's own website, submitted as Creative Bureau Sponge Digital&Design Website, scored 28 points, less than half the shortlist threshold. The Arbitrage Top site received 23 points. The Estetico.me magazine, the studio's only work in G-2, scored 39 points, below the bronze threshold of 68. For a studio that had already participated in international web competitions by that time, such a result looked modest, but festival points measure something different from industry marks.
It is important to note that the bureau website sent to Kyiv was the 2013 and 2014 version. The studio itself was already noticeable in the professional community by then. On 5 December 2013, its website received an Honorable Mention at Awwwards, a platform where websites are evaluated by a jury and the design community. On 9 February 2014, Splashnology, a web design resource, included Sponge's work in the selection '30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration', where the studio was ranked 23rd out of 30.
What was happening alongside the festival
In parallel, Sponge was also making strides beyond web design. The Estetico.me website was recognised at the Ukrainian Design competition in 2014, and on 17 October of the same year AIN.UA published the piece 'What dynamic design can do: the example of the creative bureau Sponge'. In August and September 2014, the Alien video appeared on Behance, earning a mark in the Motion Graphics category as part of Adobe Motion Graphics Served.
The studio's founder, Bogdan Gnatyuk, was also involved in the early days of Looks.fm, a service that the Korrespondent blog wrote about on 13 February and 5 March 2015. The project's director and product manager was Kirill Solyar, who later appeared in IGate roundups as executive director of Sponge D&D. Gnatyuk also took part in creating the service, which never became the studio's main business, and the studio continued to produce work for clients and for its own portfolio.
The website that collected awards
The awards at eight global platforms relate to the new version of the bureau's website. On 8 May 2015, the case study for this website was published on Behance. Then, from 24 May to 14 August 2015, the website received a series of Site of the Day marks and similar awards at CSSDA, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSS Winner, BestCSS, CSSReel and Awwwards, where the mark is dated 8 August. For the American version of the site, One Page Love, BestCSS and CSSDA Special Kudos were added.
The difference between the 2014 entry and these awards is telling: the Kyiv jury was evaluating a version that had already become outdated by the time the next website came out. The studio, however, did not stop at the festival and over the course of a year went from an Awwwards mark to an international series of awards. On 14 August 2015, CSSDA awarded the American version of the site Special Kudos, and that concluded the summer series of marks.
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