The ranking appears in the UAC's annual Results of the Year 2016 and covers the 2015/2016 season. First place goes to GRAPE Ukraine with 265 points. It is followed by ISD Group (187 points), AIMBULANCE (88), Vintage (87), AGAMA Digital Group (63), Smartica/Skykillers (44) and Yarche Digital (36). Sponge D&D scored 29 points, enough for the eighth row of the table.
Points are accumulated from awards at national and international competitions. The main source was Ukrainian Design, the Ukrainian design and advertising competition. In 2015 the studio's work for Madonna received the top tier, The Very Best of, and the bureau's website was recognised in the Best of category. A logo created for the Odesa channel KTK landed in the Best of category in the logos section. These results gave the studio the bulk of its points in the overall standings.
The UAC yearbook also records results by discipline. In digital, Sponge D&D shared 14th–15th place with 8 points. In Print & Outdoor the team ranked 11th to 15th with 4 points, and in Design it shared 38th to 56th place with 2 points. For the overall ranking, the digital component did the heaviest lifting, and it is there that the studio is most visible.
The road from 21st place
A year earlier the picture looked different. In the 2014/2015 season the studio finished the UAC ranking in 21st place with 4 points. The interim UAC ranking of 17 October 2014 put it 12th with the same 4 points, meaning the main growth came in the final months of the season and from work released in 2015.
A notable part of that growth came from international awards for the bureau's website. The site was recognised in several web design competitions at once. On 24 May CSS Design Awards named it site of the day with a score of 7.80; on 13 June it became site of the day on CSS Winner with a score of 7.5; and on 8 August Awwwards, one of the best-known international web design competitions, chose it as site of the day with a score of 7.03. The site also won awards at BestCSS and CSSReel.
On 22 October 2015, the Golden Site 2015 awards ceremony took place in Moscow. The Sponge D&D website took first place in the Digital Agency Website category. In the developers' ranking run by the same award, the studio secured 17th–19th place with 9 points. For a Ukrainian bureau, this was one of its first notable recognitions outside the domestic market.
People and work
The studio was founded and led by Bohdan Hnatiuk. In 2014, the bureau's executive director Kyrylo Soliar gave an interview to Innabits, discussing the company's work and speaking at Design.Lab. The lead designer at the time was Serhii Semernov, who later headed art direction at Sponge D&D.
The 2015/2016 season tested the team's ability to sustain results. The studio kept delivering client work while competing in awards, and those scores directly shaped its place in the UAC yearbook. In 2014/2015 Sponge D&D had 4 points and ranked 21st; in 2015/2016 it scored 29 points and rose to eighth place, overtaking in a single season several agencies that had ranked above it in the previous list.
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