In the AllAdvertising reprint, the ranking reads as follows: first place Red Collar, second Creative People, third AIC + QSOFT, fourth Sponge D&D, fifth Vide Infra. Twentieth place went to 12 Wave. The ranking itself was compiled by Rating Runeta, and AllAdvertising cites it directly as the source, so the fourth-place assessment should be attributed to Rating Runeta's work, not to the publication's own research.
How the ranking is calculated
The methodology is built on awards. Wins in the Rating Runeta, Golden Site, Awwwards, FWA, Webby Awards, CSS Design Awards and Behance competitions are counted. Awwwards and FWA are international web design competitions where juries select the best sites of the week and year. The Webby Awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, while CSS Design Awards and CSS Winner collect work in layout and interfaces. Behance belongs to Adobe and serves as a portfolio for designers, where curators bestow "Best of Behance" marks. Golden Site is a Russian web project competition long counted among the main industry awards of the Runet.
The ranking logic is simple, and the publication itself formulated it: "The more awards and the more prestigious the competitions a design studio has won, the higher its position." A place in the table therefore reflects neither headcount nor revenue, but the visibility of work on international platforms where sites are judged by professional juries.
What lay behind fourth place
The result was built on work from 2017. On August 23 and 25, singer Artyom Pivovarov's website received a CSS Winner Site of the Day mark, and on Awwwards the project became Site of the Day and received a Developer mark. On September 25, the Helicopter View project was included in the Best of Behance selection. By then, Sponge D&D's CSS Winner profile listed 21 works, including 9 with Site of the Day marks, 6 with Star status and 6 nominations.
The same year was productive in other rankings as well. According to Rating Runeta, the studio collected 47 awards, and in the Top 100 Digital Production compiled by Tagline it took 97th place. For comparison: in 2016, Tagline placed it 67th in its design studio ranking, a list where major international agencies stood on neighboring lines.
"The more awards and the more prestigious the competitions a design studio has won, the higher its position."
The team and project history
The studio's founder was named as Bogdan Gnatyuk. He was also one of the creators of Looks.fm, a service Korrespondent wrote about in early 2015. Work on Looks.fm showed that the bureau did not only commissioned websites but also product development. In 2016, the studio's team spoke at public events: designer Sergey Semernyov and team lead Timofey Kurshpetov discussed their work, and in October 2016 Sponge held a seminar titled "How to Open Your Own Web Studio."
External rankings noted the studio's consistency over several years. In 2014, its work appeared in Splashnology's roundup "30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration," and in 2015 the case study for the bureau's new website was published on Behance. This constant presence on professional platforms became the foundation for the 2017 results.
What came next
In the 2018 Rating Runeta, Sponge D&D rose to tenth place with 51 awards, and in 2019 it dropped to 37th place with the same number of awards. The CEO line in the 2019 ranking listed Bogdan Gnatyuk.
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