The Catch Up – August 2024

Welcome back to our monthly catch-up, where I’ll dig into some thoughts that have been on my mind and covering some of our recent work.

500 Days of AI

I’ve been wanting to put together a quick thread on my thought, experiences, and takes on AI in the industry in the second half of 2024 for a few months now, but when I actually got down to writing it the quick part flew out the window quickly. As Mark Twain once said, “I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.”

Recently we hit the 500 Day mark of the release of GPT-4, which heralded in the current era of tools that are shaping the world around us. Creatives, and anyone working in a consulting or agency model is particularly exposed to the rapid pace of change in the space – if that’s you, you’ve already probably noticed your role or day-to-day tasks changing because of it, or otherwise how you price your work or describe your work to potential clients.

In the interest of maintaining the sanctity of the form of this particular newsletter I’ve released one (1) edition of, I decided I’ll spin it out into a separate series of short tracts addressing the AI Era So Far, AI Slop, Practical AI Workflows, and the Future of AI and Creativity. The first one will be released in the next week or so, so please stay tuned and please reach out if you find it interesting or have anything of your own to share.

New Work

1. Tradezero – Development (https://tradezero.com)

Earlier this month we launched a new site for Tradezero, with design again by the talented and lovely folks at Gretel. Tradezero is a leading stock trading platform serving the US, Canada, and International markets. In addition to their proprietary platforms, they also provide a ton of informational content via blogs, informational live sessions, and daily newsletters – all accessible within their beautiful new site.

Personally this was one of my favorite projects we’ve done at Gone Fishing. Tradezero initially reached out to us due to motion being an integral part of their new brand and our command of motion on the web. Earlier on in the business I sometimes struggled to define our ideal client, but in so many words it’s exactly what we experienced here: one that understands the power of brand to their growth trajectory, and the importance of high-quality execution of that brand through all channels.

It was one of the largest informational Next.js/Sanity sites we’ve built to date, and additional challenges included serving multiple locales, complex motion components, and a lot of diagonal lines (harder than they look when it comes to th web!) In extremely close collaboration with the lovely folks at Tradezero we were firing on all cylinders to build on top of Gretel’s brand identity and express it in its fullest form on the web.

2. Recreation – Brand Design (https://www.instagram.com/recreationshow)

Our design arm, Lovely Day, has been equally hard at work over the course of this year between a mix of brand and web work. Recently team member Katherine Pihl designed the brand and collateral for new outdoor lifestyle trade show Recreation, produced by Rachael Yaeger and founded by the team at Sesame Projects. After a successful initial show in July, there’s a lot of exciting stuff coming down the line in the Recreation world, so follow along at @recreationshow on Instagram.

Lots more exciting work coming in the next few month, so stay tuned, and look out for our series on AI in your inbox soon. Thanks again for reading, always a pleasure to hear from you all.