CSS Design Awards is an international web design competition where sites are judged on visual design, development and usability. The Website of the Day title is awarded to one project per day, and on 24 May 2015 that project was the Sponge D&D website. In the competition entry, the work is listed in the web design/dev category, with tags including animated, jQuery and responsive: animation, the jQuery library for interactive elements, and responsive layout that adapts pages to different screens. The final jury score was 7.80.
The platform described the site briefly and precisely:
an interactive presentation of the company Sponge D&D and 369 works in the portfolio
For the agency, the site was both a company showcase and a catalogue of work. The updated version brought together almost four hundred projects in one place, and it was this combination that the jury highlighted when speaking of animation and responsiveness. The agency's founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk, put on the site what the studio wanted to show clients and colleagues: the company and its work in a single format.
A season that began with one award
The CSSDA publication was the first link in a chain that stretched over two and a half months. On 29 May the site received Site of the Day at CSS Nectar, another international web design gallery. On 3 June came Featured of the Day at CSS Light, on 13 June Site of the Day at CSS Winner with a score of 7.5. On 20 July the site became Site of the Day at BestCSS, on 27 July it received Winner status at CSSReel, and on 8 August it closed the chain with Site of the Day at Awwwards with a score of 7.03.
Awwwards is the most famous of these platforms. Sites there are judged on design, creativity and usability, and the Site of the Day title is awarded once a day. The scores of 7.80 at CSSDA and 7.03 at Awwwards are given on different scales and criteria, so comparing the numbers directly is incorrect. What matters more is that the site passed through the juries of seven platforms with different selection rules, and each link in the chain confirmed the result of the previous one.
What was happening alongside
The agency's site was not the only studio project recognised in 2015. Geeks Empire received CSS Light on 23 June and nominee status at CSS Winner on 29 June. Foundator became a CSS Winner nominee on 11 July and received Site of the Day at BestCSS on 21 July. Another agency site, registered separately on CSSDA, received a CSS Winner nomination on 3 August and was featured on One Page Love, a gallery of single-page sites. On 10 August it became Site of the Day at BestCSS, and on 14 August it received Special Kudos from CSSDA with a score of 7.57, a special distinction from the competition jury.
On the domestic scene, the studio's work was also noticed. In the UD 2015 competition, the Sponge D&D site received the Best of B-1 category, and in the same year the agency's logo and other works were recognised in UD competition categories. For a studio that worked with clients from various industries, such coincidences meant that international juries and local experts saw the same thing in it: a consistent visual language and technical precision.
The crowning recognition came within the country. On 22 October 2015 at the Golden Site 2015 ceremony in Moscow, the Sponge site took first place in the Digital Agency Website category. It was the first statuette in a series of awards that year which the studio received for the site, rather than for an individual client project.
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