Another week, another branding project for those – love them or loathe them – ‘pet parents’. I honestly thought we were post-pet-parent, but seemingly we’re still very much in the midst of that icky phrasing – the “live, love, laugh” of dogs, a sort of endless bottomless brunch with the #girlies. I’m an ‘elder millennial’, but it all seems disgustingly, well, ‘elder millennial’.

But then, what’s the alternative? I also hate the idea of ‘pet owners’, because in my view, we cannot ‘own’ another creature – we might just find ourselves lucky enough to, say, share our flat with the best chihuahua (nae, the best dog! The very best creature, in fact!) in the world. We do not ‘own’ our pets – more often than not, in fact, they own us.

So I suppose pet parents will have to do for now, and it’s that audience at the heart of dog and cat insurance company Pumpkin – which has recently been rebranded by New York- and London-based brand design agency Kuba & Friends (Oddbox, The Mean Tomato).

At the heart of the branding is the very idea of out-and-proud pet parenting – going so far as to see dogs and cats referred to as ‘kids’, in fact. With only 4% of pet owners in the US having pet insurance, pumpkincare.com [sic – this is not the correct URL] needed to appeal more directly to pet parents and veterinarians with unapologetic devotion for their pets,” Kuba & Friends explains.

“Armed with insight work, we created a new distinctive identity and tone of voice that defiantly champions pet parent bonds – no permission, no apologies. After all, unconditional love demands uncompromising care,” it continues.

The agency worked across pretty much everything, from the strategy, tone of voice and visual identity to copywriting, creating a custom brand typeface, illustration, and social content.

The wordmark is in that sort of slightly kooky, chunky, just-the-right-side-of-a-bit-ridiculous lettering we’re seeing a lot of at the moment: just this morning on the Central Line, I took a photo of two posters inside the tube, next to one another, one for bespoke cleaning company Wecasa and one for eco-friendly toilet roll brand Naked Paper. There’s a fair bit of it about at the minute, is what I’m saying – that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing, but I do wonder if – in a similar way to the post-post-Chobani effect – it might make things feel a wee bit dated soon.

That’s not to say it doesn’t look good though: it’s brilliantly in-keeping with the overall brand tone of voice – upbeat, straightforward, very gently hip, resolutely contemporary.

The same can be said for the colour palette, which uses a nice bright almost nuclearish yellow with a very slight green tinge, alongside black, cream, a charming powdery baby blue and a nice shade of violet. I really like the palette, and it works brilliantly for a brand like this – not too cutesy, not too twee, not too obviously attempting to be cool, never fusty, always eye-catching and certainly something ownable in the usually rather bland insurance space.

Aside from the wordmark, the typography largely uses a bespoke brand font called Pumpkin Serif, which is modified from a font called Nib, according to Kuba & Friends. On the Pumpkin website, this is paired with a sans serif font called Rethink Sans – a delightful little number that rewards repeat looking, designed by Vancouver-based Hans Thiessen. At first Rethink seems super straightforward – classic, workhorse, legible sans – but on closer inspection there’s a ton of delightful little weirdnesses going on.

While I think the colour palette is really smart, the type is great (and I do like the wordmark, despite the current ubiquity of its aesthetic); the standout aspect of the new identity for me is undoubtedly the art direction as seen on touchpoints like billboards and posters, where these brand elements are combined with some brilliantly shot pet imagery.

It all works together really well: chatty but trustworthy, arresting but pared back where it needs to be, cute but not overtly cutesy.

However, in my opinion the illustration lets this project down. We’ve seen some great illustration lately for petcare brands – namely the superb designs for HotDog by SMLXL – but Pumpkin’s feels rather phoned in. It’s giving modern-day ClipArt, and I’m not sure it really fits the rest of the brand design – simply because it doesn’t look half as skilfully done, it just feels – to me at least – a tad half-arsed, rushed perhaps.

Which is a shame, because as I say, there’s a lot of strong stuff here – but likewise, a few areas where I’d argue there’s room for improvement.