CSS Nectar is one of those galleries that collects the best websites from around the world and breaks them down by category. The Site of the Day title is awarded to one site per date, so landing in that section means the project was singled out from a large flow of work. For the Ukrainian bureau, this was not its first encounter with international professional attention, but it was the first time in a long while that several awards had gone to the same updated site.
A week earlier, on 24 May, the site received the Website of the Day title on CSS Design Awards with a score of 7.80. That award recognizes sites chosen by expert ratings and gives a project a public showcase in the international design community. Five days later it was CSS Nectar's turn, where the entry for the site reads short and dry:
“Sponge Digital by Sponge Digital and Design, ukraine, Site of the Day: 29 May 2015”.
In the gallery's card, the bureau appears under its project's name, with the country and date, and it is this line that records the fact of the award. For the studio, this mattered not only as a line in the portfolio but also as a signal that the new site was perceived as a standalone design object rather than a showcase for services.
The run that continued until August
After CSS Nectar, the awards came one after another. On 3 June the site was noted on CSS Light, and on 13 June it received the Site of the Day title on CSS Winner with a score of 7.5. The CSS Winner gallery is built on a system of tiers: first come nominations, then stars, and finally the Site of the Day title, which stands above the other marks. For a project that had only just gone online, such speed of advancement through the tiers was notable.
The run continued in July. On 20 July the site became Site of the Day on BestCSS, and on 27 July it received the Winner title on CSSReel. The last in this series was the Awwwards mark on 8 August: the site received the Site of the Day title with a score of 7.03. Awwwards is considered one of the most famous international web design platforms, and its marks are valued in the professional community noticeably higher than regional competitions.
What stood behind the new site
The success of spring 2015 was not accidental. Back on 5 December 2013, Awwwards gave an Honorable Mention to the previous version of the bureau's site, and the studio's founder, Bohdan Hnatiuk, consistently built up work on the company's visual language. The new version continued that line, and that is why awards for it were perceived in the industry as a continuation of an already stated direction.
In 2014, the bureau's work was also discussed in professional media. On 19 August, in an interview with Innabits, executive director Kyrylo Soliar spoke about the studio's internal workings, and on 21 August DesignWebKit noted the symmetry of the Sponge site's menu. In October, AIN.UA wrote about the bureau's dynamic design, and by spring 2015 the team had already accumulated a public track record on which new projects relied.
The run that began on 29 May ended on 8 August with the Awwwards mark, and by that time the bureau's site had received awards in four international galleries at once, including CSS Nectar, CSS Winner, BestCSS and Awwwards.
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