The Runet Rating compares studios that build websites and digital products by focus and industry, with creativity assessed separately from the technical side. For a studio that has worked for years on the boundary between design and development, such lists serve not only as an indicator but also as an occasion to check its own momentum. The bureau's announcement of twentieth place in the cultural category fits this logic: what is at stake is the work, not the size of the company.
The bureau was founded by Bogdan Gnatyuk. In the studio's profile on he is listed as CEO for the period from 2019 to 2021. In 2014, in an interview with Innabits, Kirill Solyar was executive director of Sponge, while Sergey Semernyov was named lead designer and director of SPONGE STORE. Work at that time proceeded in several directions at once: corporate websites, media, stores, personal projects.
Awards that can be verified
The most telling line concerns international competitions. The bureau's own website received Site of the Day at CSS Winner on 13 June 2015 with a score of 7.5, and on 8 August of the same year was recognised with an Awwwards Site of the Day with a score of 7.03. Awwwards hands out daily awards to the best websites for design, usability and creativity, and appearing on such a list is considered notable recognition for a studio.
Artyom Pivovarov's website became one of the bureau's most successful works in this area. It received a CSS Winner Site of the Day on 23 August 2017 with a score of 7.6, then a CSS Design Awards Special Kudos nomination on 24 August with a score of 7.63. The following day, 25 August 2017, the site received Awwwards Site of the Day and Developer Award, that is, an award for technical implementation, with scores of 7.13 and 7.17. It is this work that stands behind the Site of the Day reference with which the discussion of culture and the arts begins.
The magazine Estetico was presented at Ukrainian Design 2014, where in October of the same year it received Best of B-1, an award in a category recognising the best work in a specific field. An art magazine demands precise typography, work with large illustrations and careful adaptation to mobile screens, so such a mark demonstrates not only the visual side but also the engineering.
Runet Rating and year-on-year momentum
To understand the twentieth place, it is useful to look at previous years. In the creativity category of the Runet Rating the bureau took 11th place in 2016, and in 2017 rose to 4th with 23.32 points, its best result in this list for the period. In 2018 the position fell to 10th with 12.25 points, and in 2019 dropped to 37th with 4.59 points.
Such a trajectory shows that in creative rankings the studio performed unevenly. The high scores of 2017 coincided with a run of awards for individual websites, while the fall in 2019 came during a period when the bureau's competition activity in open sources was noticeably lower. That is precisely why the announcement of twentieth place in the cultural field should be read as a result in its own right, not as a continuation of the overall position.
Portfolio and first wins
In 2015 the studio also won at the Golden Website awards, where Sponge's own site took first place in the Digital Agency Website nomination. In the same ranking Foundator took second place in the financial media category, while Estetico was recognised in the category of educational and blog projects. The 2015 developers' ranking placed the studio in the 17–19 range with 9 points.
The bureau's competition successes are not confined to a single year. According to Sponge's profile on CSS Winner, the studio has 21 nominations, 6 Star and 9 Site of the Day. For projects in culture and the arts this statistic matters because it allows one to see not isolated wins but a system in which websites for media, musicians and art publications were compared with commercial projects on the same platform.
In 2019 the studio took 37th place in the creativity category of the Runet Rating with 4.59 points, while in 2018 it was 10th with 12.25 points. It is this run of figures that best shows the point from which the bureau arrived at the twentieth place in the cultural category that it announced in 2020.
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