A catalog of every 'Saturday Night Live' host
UX/UI
Client: Morning Consult
Roles: Lead designer, art direction
Co-designers: Samantha Elbouez
Year: 2019
Morning Consult published a visual article analyzing data on SNL’s long list of guest hosts over the course of 44 seasons. The analysis looks at this data as a potential reflection of the entertainment industry as a whole, highlighting the disproportionate makeup of white male hosts and exploring why this pattern occurs. The page itself includes interactive graphs as well as design choices that take inspiration from SNL’s 2019 opening sequence.
I used Adobe XD to create the designs and to handoff to Morning Consult’s inhouse development team. Responsive mobile and tablet designs were also included in the process.
Art Direction
These unique editorial articles offered opportunities to explore design choices outside of the Morning Consult brand. Saturday Night Live has an iconic opening title, and the past decade of seasons has featured shots of New York City (often in black and white) and bright, nearly neon, condensed type. I decided to create an homage to those styles with the article’s landing and title page so that when a user visits this editorial piece, the content is immediately recognizable. However, we were able to incorporate Morning Consult fonts and secondary brand colors which helped anchor these styles to the brand.
The landing page design also uses parallax scrolling to mimic an opening credits animation.
Prototype of parallax scrolling designed with Adobe XD
Interactive Graphs
One of my main responsibilities was to design a unique, interactive graph, showcasing data on 894 SNL hosts. A key challenge here was how to present a huge data set without it feeling overwhelming to a user. Working with the editorial team, we landed on a dot chart that could be filtered and categorized by decades. The graph allowed for informational annotations that could highlight important details on a particular host or year.
Using Adobe XD’s prototyping features, I also designed how the graph would flow and animate, thinking keenly on how a user would interact with the data.
Prototype of dot chart functionality designed with Adobe XD
