According to the IGate profile, Sponge's main offices are in Odesa and New Jersey. Kyrylo Soliar is listed as executive director. Alongside founder Bohdan Hnatiuk, the leadership section names the company's co-owner and the executive director himself. The exact founding date is given by the CSS Winner profile, which dates the studio's establishment to 22 November 2009. The studio grew out of an earlier project that was renamed Sponge in 2007.
A description of the company's reputation occupies a special place in the profile. The directory states: “Sponge gained particular fame and recognition as a result of victories at local and international professional competitions, as well as a series of provocative advertising campaigns.” The wording was evidently drafted from the company's own account: almost verbatim the same text appears in the encyclopedia article about the studio on Tsiklopediya. The phrase is therefore better read as the agency's self-description rather than as an assessment by an independent jury. It can be checked against the specific awards and publications that genuinely exist.
Competitions: from Awwwards to CSS Winner
International website platforms became the studio's most visible arena. Awwwards rates web projects on design, usability and technical execution, with marks awarded by a jury and the community. Sponge received an Awwwards Honorable Mention on 5 December 2013. A year and a half later the studio collected a whole series of Site of the Day (SOTD) marks and similar awards. Between 24 May and 14 August 2015 such marks appeared on CSSDA, CSS Nectar, CSS Light, CSS Winner, BestCSS, CSSReel and Awwwards, the last of them dated 8 August 2015. For the American version of one site, One Page Love, BestCSS and a CSSDA Special Kudos were added, with the CSSDA Special Kudos mark falling on 14 August 2015.
Domestic competitions ran in parallel. On 30 May 2014 the studio submitted seven entries to the 15th Kyiv International Advertising Festival (KIAF), and the list contains no awards resulting from that submission. The entries were nonetheless scored, meaning the participation was genuine. In 2014, Ukrainian Design recognised the Estetico.me site and a logo for Pervy Gorodskoy, while the Alien video landed in the Motion Graphics section on Behance, Adobe's portfolio service, where the studio's page was set up on 23 August 2013.
Advertising, services and publications
The studio drew press attention not only through website design but also through its own projects. On 9 February 2014 the Splashnology portal included a Sponge work in its “30 Dark Web Designs for Inspiration” selection, at number 23 out of thirty. On 17 October 2014 AIN.UA, a Ukrainian technology publication, ran the piece “What Dynamic Design Can Do: The Example of the Sponge Creative Bureau.”
The most talked-about project associated with Sponge was the Looks.fm service. A Korrespondent correspondent wrote about it in blogs on 13 February and 5 March 2015. Bohdan Hnatiuk is named as one of the service's creators, while Kyrylo Soliar at that time headed Looks.fm and was its product manager. In the summer of 2015 Soliar published a column in the Goethe-Institut magazine, and the bureau was later mentioned in the Runet Rating as a participant in the digital agency creativity section.
The studio's work also drew notice on Behance. On 30 June 2015 a motion design project featuring Madonna appeared on the service, and on 21 September that year Sostav included it in its “Best Summer Projects from Behance” selection. Attention to the studio thus built up through several channels at once: website competitions, industry publications and portfolios.
On 4 February 2016 the Korrespondent blog devoted a piece to the Furgoneta site and CSS Light. That same day CSS Winner awarded Furgoneta its Site of the Day mark. This is one of the latest publications to which news items are linked in the IGate profile, and it shows that the studio's competition track continued into early 2016.
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