White Tetris positions itself as an unconventional law company, and the studio was tasked with creating a website that would itself confirm that unconventionality. Sponge D&D achieved this not through the usual set of strict blocks typical of legal websites, but through a video game. Text and graphics in the project are balanced so that the visitor does not drown in formal language but navigates the site like a game.
A game instead of a brochure
Awwwards, one of the leading international resources on web design, described the project as follows: White Tetris is called an “unusual law firm,” and for it a video game was made that maintains the right balance between text and visuals. This formula accurately conveys the studio’s logic. The law company received a website that explains its approach while remaining understandable to someone without a legal education.
“With the right balance of copy and graphics,” as Awwwards noted.
The work did not stop at the website. The studio developed the firm’s logo, the website and a promotional video, and these materials were featured in Behance Featured collections in two categories at once: web and motion graphics. Behance, Adobe’s portfolio platform where designers publish projects and the editorial team selects the best works for thematic collections, so this inclusion indicates the professional community’s attention to the project as a whole, not just the website.
What the scores mean
CSS Winner, a website catalog and web design rating, marks each site with individual scores for design, functionality, usability and content, then calculates a final score. Site of the Day is awarded to the site of the day, that is, one work that the jury deemed outstanding. White Tetris’s scores were distributed as follows: design 7.6, functionality 7.7, usability 7.7, content 7.4, final score 7.6. The highest scores went to functionality and usability, the most modest to content, and for a site with a large amount of text this gap is quite typical.
Awwwards operates on its own system. A nominee, that is, a project that made the shortlist, is an intermediate stage, and there was no award for White Tetris here. Therefore the precise description of the story is this: the project was nominated on Awwwards and received the main daily mark on CSS Winner.
The studio in the 2016 season
For Sponge D&D this result continued a line that began long before White Tetris. The bureau’s own website received Site of the Day on CSS Winner on 13 June 2015 with a score of 7.5, and on CSS Design Awards the Website of the Day mark on 24 May with a score of 7.80. In the same year 2015, at the Golden Site award, the Sponge website took first place in the “Digital Agency Website” category, and Best of B-1 at the UD competition recognized the bureau’s own site.
In 2016 the studio continued to receive recognition in various ratings. The bureau’s projects appeared in CSS Winner lists: on 4 February the Furgoneta website received Site of the Day, on 10 July the Trendon website received the same mark. Trendon Online Shop also received Best of B-1 at UD 2016. At Golden Site 2016, Furgoneta and Trendon took first places in their categories. By the end of the year the studio entered the Runet creativity rating at 11th place.
Bohdan Hnatiuk, the studio’s founder, was developing the bureau in those years as a company with its own line of work, and White Tetris fitted well into that line: the project simultaneously solved the firm’s commercial task and showed that the studio could handle an unconventional brief. For the client this meant a website that is memorable, and for the studio a confirmation that game logic can work in the most conservative niche.
What happened next
The CSS Winner mark was not the last for the studio’s works in 2016. On 30 November Awwwards gave the Simbrella project an honourable mention, and on 11 December the same project received a CSS Winner star. In December 2016, the Lexenger work was also nominated on CSS Winner, and in 2017 the studio continued to release projects that received marks on CSS Winner and Awwwards.
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