The client list on the studio's profile reads like a roll call of prominent Ukrainian brands: Hennessy, Simbrella, Dengi Srazu, Obolon, Kredo Bank,, Gaztron-Ukraine and the Chornomorets football club. In the same line the ranking also names MMM, a name that for a broad audience has long been tied to the biggest financial pyramid of the 1990s, so this entry should be read as a list rather than as a confirmed endorsement of every order.
The studio's profile on the Tagline site is built around founder Bohdan Hnatiuk, who is listed among its key figures in that capacity. The bureau works on SLA, meaning service-level agreements that fix response times, the scope of support and the responsibilities of the parties. For clients with banking and media projects such a model is standard, and in the ranking it is presented as one of the studio's advantages.
The earlier description and the new place
The ranking kept the same wording that described the studio a year earlier. Here it is verbatim:
“Good products and service, many awards, first-tier clients.”
A place in the ranking by itself says nothing about a fall or a rise. In 2016 Sponge appeared in Tagline's ranking of design studios at No. 67, alongside Saatchi & Saatchi. That ranking and the current Top 100 digital-production list are compiled by different criteria, so 67th and 97th cannot be compared directly. What matters more for the studio is that in 2017 it made the list of digital-production companies for the first time.
The bureau was founded in 2009. Its early years are tied to projects that reached far beyond Ukraine. In 2013 the studio's site received a mention from Awwwards, one of the best-known platforms for judging web design, and in 2015 a series of Site of the Day marks came from CSS Winner, CSS Nectar, BestCSS and other resources. Site of the Day, or SOTD, is awarded by contest curators, and it is the main public currency in the web designer's profession: a mark of the day gives a project the attention of a professional audience within twenty-four hours.
Autumn 2017: awards and commissions
The summer and autumn of 2017 brought the studio several notable marks. On 23 and 25 August the site of the singer Artem Pyvovarov received SOTD on CSS Winner, and on Awwwards the project became Site of the Day and received a separate Developer mark, awarded for technical execution. On 25 September the work appeared in a Best of Behance selection, which features projects chosen by curators of the Behance platform, owned by Adobe.
On 28 September the Rating of the Runet placed the digital agencies in the “creativity” category in fourth place. The result immediately spread through the trade press: reports of it appeared in a business blog on Sostav and on AllAdvertising. For a studio with a staff of thirty, fourth place in the creativity ranking became a notable point in the public field, not just a line in a table.
A separate story concerns Looks.fm, a service discussed by Ukrainian and Russian media in 2015. One of its creators, Bohdan Hnatiuk, is connected to Sponge as the bureau's founder. The service's head and product manager was Kyrylo Soliar, who in 2016 listings was named executive director of Sponge D&D. Such an overlap of projects and people is typical of small studios, where a strong product and a strong team grow together.
Tagline's description itself ends with the same set of words as a year earlier: products, service, awards and first-tier clients. Now a line about the place in the Top 100 and the marks received in the summer and autumn of 2017 has been added to that formula. On 6 October Pyvovarov's site also made it into the Tochka listing, which published a piece with a link to the project's press-service text.
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