Sponge D&D was founded and is led by Bohdan Hnatiuk, the head of a bureau that operates in Odesa and creates design for websites, magazines, music services, and TV channels. In 2014, the studio significantly expanded its work with motion—that is, animated graphics—and in the fall this shift caught the attention of the Ukrainian press.
The central figure was the Alien, the bureau's mascot. It began as a flat image, then transformed into a three-dimensional figure, and finally into an animated character. The character's journey mirrored the studio's own: from static design to videos where images move and respond to the viewer's actions.
The first notable result was the bureau's commercial. The jury of Behance, the portal where designers showcase their work and which is owned by Adobe, selected it for the "Adobe Motion Graphics Served" collection, a curated selection of motion graphics put together by the platform's editors. For the studio, this recognition meant attention not from a local audience but from the professional community that reviews work from around the world.
A second video followed, featuring a robot named Inkjet Drawer. Its life-size figure had stood in the bureau's headquarters for over a year, and the video continued the line started with the Alien: a character evolving from an image into an object that can be seen in the studio's space.
Projects highlighted by AIN.UA
The publication listed the bureau's main works of the year: Estetico.me magazine, the music service Looks.fm, and the Geeks Empire portal. AIN.UA's assessment was phrased as follows:
"in fact demonstrated this year new possibilities for creating dynamic design"
It is worth noting that the material appeared in a section where companies publish their own texts, so some of the wording may well have come from the studio itself. Nevertheless, the projects themselves are corroborated by independent competitions and rankings.
In October 2014, between the 13th and 17th, at the UD 2014 competition, the Estetico.me magazine website received the Best of B-1 award, and the logo for the TV channel "Pervyi Gorodskoi" was honored with the Best of C-I-5 distinction. In the interim ranking of the Ukrainian Design Awards (VRK), the bureau held 12th place with four points on that same day, October 17.
What happened next
As AIN.UA wrote, the studio's leadership at the time promised an animated film in the first decade of 2015. The move toward cinema seemed a logical continuation of the videos featuring the Alien and the robot, but I have not been able to confirm the timing or format of the film in subsequent publications about the bureau, so any talk of results should be cautious.
The web direction, however, developed noticeably. The bureau's website gained recognition on international platforms that highlight the best in web design. On June 13, 2015, it became a Winner Site of the Day on CSS Winner, and on August 8 of the same year it was featured as Site of the Day on Awwwards, one of the most prestigious awards in the field.
The year's crowning achievement was the "Golden Site 2015" award, where Sponge's website took first place in the "Digital Agency Website" category. This statuette confirmed that the path from the Alien's flat images to interactive websites and videos—which in 2014 looked like a series of successful projects—had become a sustainable direction for the studio.
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