The compilers of the ranking characterized the studio briefly and precisely. Their formulation packs three arguments in favor of the bureau at once:
“Good products and service, many awards, first-tier clients.”
For a market where clients choose a contractor by portfolio and reputation, such an assessment matters more than a loud line. Tagline's ranking also contains a price guide: working with Sponge D&D is listed as expensive, from 3 to 10 million rubles. This is the segment of large projects, where a website and corporate identity are commissioned as part of a business strategy, not as a one-off service.
What lies behind the word “awards”
The most weighty confirmation of reputation in digital lies in international professional rankings. Awwwards, one of the main web design competitions, marks websites with points and confers the titles Site of the Day and Honorable Mention. The CSS Winner community works similarly: it selects the best sites of the day and week, and also awards Star and Nominee statuses. On Sponge D&D's profile on CSS Winner there are 21 nominations, 6 Star and 9 SOTD, that is, wins of the day.
The bureau's first notable results date to 2015. The studio's website received a score of 7.80 from CSS Design Awards in the “Site of the Day” category on May 24, and on June 13 it made it to Site of the Day on CSS Winner with a score of 7.5. In October 2015 at the Moscow Golden Site ceremony, Sponge D&D's website took first place in the “Digital Agency Website” nomination. In the Ukrainian VRK ranking, which Creativity Ukraine maintains, the studio for 2015/2016 took eighth place among digital agencies with 29 points.
A year of client projects
Most of the 2016 awards went to work for the studio's clients. The Furgoneta website received an Honorable Mention on Awwwards on January 30, and then Site of the Day status on CSS Winner on February 4 and on CSS Nectar on February 7. Kvadrat was noted on CSS Nectar on February 21, Carts Guru received Site of the Day on CSS Winner on March 6, and Murka in May received Star status on the same CSS Winner. The Trendon project in June was noted on Awwwards, and on July 10 became Site of the Day on CSS Winner.
In Golden Site 2016, two of the awards, it seems, went to Furgoneta and Trendon, which became first in their nominations. The Runet Creativity Ranking placed the studio 11th in the same year.
Team and dates
The bureau was founded by Bohdan Hnatiuk, and it is his name that is associated with the studio's growth in recent years. In 2014, in an interview with Innabits, Sponge's executive director Kyrylo Soliar spoke about the bureau's work, and in the same year the studio became prominent in the Ukrainian professional press: AIN.UA wrote about its dynamic design, and Creativity Ukraine placed it 12th in the interim VRK ranking.
With the founding dates the picture is ambiguous. Tagline's ranking names 2009, and the same date is indicated by the caption on the bureau's profile on CSS Winner, where the studio's birthday is marked November 22, 2009. The studio itself traces its history from 2000. The Ruward ranking places Sponge D&D in the design studio category 68th in 2015 and 67th in 2016, that is, it records the same dynamic as Tagline.
The 2016 ranking became a continuation of the series the studio began on international platforms. The last notable event in this series was Site of the Day on CSS Winner for the Trendon online store website, received on July 10, 2016.
1
