From the moment I turned the sound up (as per instructions) on the ‘about’ page of the HotDog website, safe to say I was obsessed with this brand and its branding. It’s laugh out loud hilarious – I truly loled, as did the person I was sharing a room with, and as I’m sure anyone within eye- or ear-shot would have too, unless they hated dogs, or were so misanthropic as to have depleted any and all semblance of a sense of humour.

And all because of this short little looping video with an infuriatingly catchy song: “this is a dog. This is a HotDog. This is a dog. This is a HotDog,” and so on and so forth.

It flashes through art history dogs, small dogs, big dogs, carefully art directed HotDog model dogs; through meme dogs and Doge dogs and a fat old chihuahua and some charmingly illustrated dogs (more on which later). It pilfers directly from meme culture in its lettering and attitude and the fast-paced hyper-cuts editing style but never, ever feels like it’s trying too hard.

The entire visual and verbal voice for HotDog – playful, properly daft at times, but ultimately so artfully wrought that it doesn’t just strive for but actively resembles a fashion editorial – is superb. And that’s thanks to SMLXL, a full-service design company based in New York and Barcelona focused on branding, packaging, digital and editorial illustration.

Everything is built around a fairly no-nonsense strategic framework: “rooted in honesty, irreverence, and fun,” says SMLXL. “Raw, unfiltered, and a little messy, its verbal identity goes straight to the gut.”

It really does, but in a thoroughly joyful way: it’s not shouty and punchy for the sake of being so, but cuts right to the chase with the simple, ridiculous joy of dogs and the people who love them.

This means the branding is colourful and bold and vibrant, but with carefully reined in limitations: nothing feels too ‘everything everywhere for the sake of it’, rather things are tempered by a lightness of touch that once again seems to go back to a sort of editorial approach.

I mean that not just in the way that the holistic brand identity seems to tell a story in its own way, but in the way that there’s a singular vision – and in less abstract terms, because of the way the skilful art direction anchors the whole thing so beautifully.

In both lifestyle and product shoots, there’s a sense here that this is a brand that appreciates beauty – in products and branding alike. It doesn’t shy away from beautiful people or beautiful dogs or beautifully curated aspirational lifestyles – it celebrates them almost to the point of gently poking fun at how silly all of those things are, chiming with the silliness of the creatures at the very heart of the whole thing.

The logomark itself is an absolute masterstroke that’s both inherently very funny and yet also slick enough to not feel out of place in any hefty graphic design studio coffee table book of classic logos – it’s got that wit of Fletcher/Forbes/Gill et al in its use of interlocking entities, negative space; that need to double take to see what we’re meant to see, the use of just black and white and a neat little roundel to contain the whole thing.

What is that whole thing? Well, obviously, it’s one dog sniffing another’s bum, reduced to its most simplistic forms. An absolute masterstroke.

The branding is also kept simple through the decision to use just one font, Founders Grotesk by New Zealand type foundry Klim. It’s a good choice in its legibility, simplicity and unobtrusiveness. This is used throughout the branding applications in various weights, from packing tape to the main wordmark to the website copy, posters, social posts, product tags such as on collars, and more.

One of the absolute standouts with SMLXL’s brand design here is the suite of brilliant illustrations, which vary in style and again, appear throughout the entire brand world. They prove that illustration has so many uses far beyond decoration: on packing tape, black and white illustrations of dogs become patterning; on the website as cute animations that liven up the usually rather irritating invitations to sign up to the brand’s newsletter (I really can’t get enough of the waggy tailed envelope dog); sometimes more painterly illustrations take the place of brand photography to showcase products like bowls.

There’s no singular illustration style here, and that works because the rest of the brand – from products to type to photographic approach and verbal tone of voice – is uniformly, doggedly (pardon the pun) all so absolutely ownable to HotDog.

This project is a brilliant example of how to do ‘fun’ without being stoopid; how to celebrate beauty without snobbishness; how to be cool without ever looking like you’re trying to be. In short, it manages to encompass all that’s wonderful about dogs in a brand that’s made uniquely for them.