The Catch Up – July 2024

Hey folks, long time to write.

The first half of this year has fortunately been incredibly busy for us with client work with the unfortunate side effect that it left very little time for philosophizing. Hopefully towards the end of summer I’ll regain some of that brain space, but for now I figured I would turn this into a semi-frequent catch up on what’s been going on at Gone Fishing.

First up, a short list of our releases so far this year:

1. GOA Architecture

   

   
   Last year Gretel reached out to us to see if we’d be interested in bringing their new brand for legendary New Haven-based architecture firm GOA Architecture (fka Gray Organschi Architecture). We’ve been huge fans of Gretel for a long time, so it was a dream to collaborate with them on this experimental, yet structural and slick site for the truly lovely folks at GOA. Some more exciting collaborations with Gretel coming up soon as well 😏.

2. TruBridge

   

   This was our first Wordpress project at Gone Fishing, and we jumped right into the fire. Designed by the great folks at Good Giant and Whatever Studio, we built out a content platform for a publicly traded healthcare company Trubridge. Although we do have preferences, philosophically we’re technology-agnostic, so it was great to have the chance to put our money where our mouth is and expand our toolbox for delivering high-quality websites.

3. Quite Nice

   

   
   Another feather in our technology-agnostic cap – we collaborated with our friends over at Baggy to build a slick Shopify theme for gut-friendly breakfast brand Quite Nice. This was also our first Shopify theme in quite a while – the advancements that Shopify has been making to the platform lately made us excited to jump back into it, and we have a handful of really exciting Shopify builds to be launched in the coming months that we can’t wait to show off. Delightful design on this one by Anna Brenner of Studio Tibby.

Reflections

July marks three years since I dedicated myself full-time to building Gone Fishing, and it now feels like we’re approaching what I envisioned for the studio when I started on this journey back in 2021.

We’ve got a full calendar, an absolutely killer lineup of work releasing this year, and we’re carving out our niche as a design-minded development studio and a frequent partner to some of the best design studios in the world (in my opinion).

Our clients increasingly ask for and trust our design opinions when it comes to building a best-in-class website, and we’re able to do high-quality work across a variety of domains and produce a product distinguishably high-quality and delightful to use both for our clients and their customers.

Part of this comes from embracing our position as a small business – since we’re able to operate at a high level in our current lean formation, we have no need to grow and the way we operate doesn’t necessarily have to scale.

When it comes to work we can operate under a few basic rules – if a project:
– Sounds interesting
– Has good and talented people involved with a track record of high-quality work
– Has a budget and timeline we think is appropriate
– Has a client focused on craft and execution
We’ll happily give 110% effort to maximize the potential impact of the site.

Web is often just one element of a brand overhaul, but it’s one where the craft bleeds directly into the look and feel and a linear increase in attention to detail can lead to exponential gains in user delight.

Being driven by quality and personal pride in our product rather than any external business KPIs allows us to maximize for that, and those compounding results are beginning to bear fruit.