When Saturday Night Live launched in the U.K. earlier this year, the show wanted a logo that looked distinctly British. To design it, the creative agency Stink Studios looked to the streets of London for inspiration.
The SNL UK mark is dynamic, and made from hundreds of photos of the letters S, N, and L that members of the Stink Studios team took of British signs in London and beyond. Letters were snapped from bus stops, sandwich shops, pubs, and other public places, and then vectorized (converted from a pixel-based image into a sharper, vector-based image) so they could be used in the variable branding.
“It was a labor of love,” Stink Studios executive creative director Rick Dodds tells Fast Company. “There are no shortcuts to it. You’ve got to go through the hard work of finding them, photographing them, vectorizing them, and working out which ones work best.”
These found S’s, N’s, and L’s were then combined with Serial B Neue, a rounded sans-serif typeface, to create a visual brand and typography that can be altered yet still maintains a sense of consistency—and the result is unabashedly British.
“Some of these letters that we photographed, they’re over 100 years old,” Dodds says. “Like the street signs that have been there for a very long time. Like road architecture that’s been there for a very long time. Signs on the road, or kebab shops and coffee shops that are decades and decades old and have never changed their signs.”
With so many letters to choose from, SNL UK has the luxury of not having to repeat itself. Each episode gets its own unique combination of the S, N, and L letters, a one-of-one logo for one night only.
The “UK” in the mark is set in superscript—with the rest of the letters shifting about on the baseline—“almost signifying the ‘UK’ as a stamp of approval or sign-off,” says senior designer Emma Judd, the lead designer on the project. The design system appears in the show’s opening title sequence, directed in collaboration with the show and the directing duo Burnermunde.
For American viewers, watching SNL UK can feel familiar yet foreign at the same time—with recognizable segments, like the cold open and “Weekend Update,” but a cast they’ve never seen before and references to British history, culture, and politics that Anglophiles will appreciate. (One sketch imagined Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, Freddie Mercury, and others having dinner together.)
“Everything about it was trying to not make it feel like an American entity that parachuted here in the U.K., but to make it feel like it was born out of British culture,” Dodds says.
It seems to have worked. The show, which Americans can stream stateside on Peacock, was renewed earlier this year for a second season, set to premiere this fall.