Stink Studios’ identity for Saturday Night Live UK is a patchwork of London’s signage and type design

Picture this: you’ve received a design brief for Saturday Night Live, an American television staple, a weekly small-screen occurrence since 1975 which has spawned spin-off films and launched careers into the stratosphere. It’s filled with some of the biggest stars on Earth. But that design brief also mentions something else. It’s for Saturday Night Live UK. For Rick Dodds, executive creative director, and Emma Judd, designer for global creative studio Stink Studios, branding briefs usually feel like standing starts. Creating something for a brand that nobody has heard of. Only in this case, nearly everyone in the world knows Saturday Night Live just by its acronym – and this British incarnation of the comedy sketch show will be standing up against the stuff of legend.

“This was taking one of the biggest American TV shows of all time, that’s still as culturally relevant today as it has ever been, and launching it here in the UK. That is a brief like no other,” says Rick. “On top of that, there are 50 years worth of iconic logos that have been created for the US version – so it was a high bar creatively.” It’s true, the US version of SNL doesn’t just have a half-century’s worth of branding presence, but also many different versions of its logo, which is uncharacteristic for such a popular brand. So, one thing that Rick and Emma hit on right away was that this identity couldn’t just be a nicely designed mark. “So we set about coming up with ideas that would make the logo feel genuinely, authentically British. Not because it was just using a British designed font, but because it was communicating undeniable British culture,” says Rick.

The British tint to SNL UK’s identity is all thanks to the country’s capital itself. As Rick was walking to an overground station, he took photographs of every S, N and L he passed, sharing them with Emma as they became excitable over the plethora of textures and personality in the wide selection. It’s an integral part of the SNL brand: to always change, to be unpredictable, to be woven into culture itself. “We took the S from the local chip shop sign, the N from the newsagents and the L from the pub on the corner to create a truly unique and iconic mark,” says Emma.

When some letters quickly became bland when vectorised, others became distinctive. “One element of the craft I love is how Emma kept the degraded quality of some of them. You can feel the texture, age and grit of the letters even though they’ve become a vector. We had to vectorise hundreds to get to the very best ones,” says Rick on the giant collage project of collecting typography from all over London.

As for the typeface, the duo landed on Serial B Neue early on in the process, as it is a variable typeface designed for expression, balancing the structure of a modern sans-serif with organic edges that create a fluid energy. “We chose to add the ‘UK’ to the end of the wordmark in a superscript style, shifting the characters above the baseline, giving the logo visual hierarchy and almost signifying the UK as a stamp of approval or sign-off,” says Emma.

For SNL UK’s title sequence, the duo worked with another duo: Burnermunde, to build a visual mish-mash of British tropes that are beloved across the world, including chip shops, black cabs, corner shops, patterned pub carpets, neon glows of ‘open’ signs. “The shots are intimate. Close up. Not telling the whole story in a shot, but the combination of shots tells the story instead. We build momentum and pause each cast member’s moment to the camera before sinking back into the action on a London street,” says Emma. “It has been super rewarding to see the logos across so many different touchpoints from the title sequence, socials, merch and even on the side of a bus. It’s great to walk past the local chip shop now and think that that little piece of my Saturday night life is now on TV.”