Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle
I’m Robin, a British designer, writer, and typographic nuisance from San Francisco. Today I’m a designer at Apple although previously I’ve made software at Retool, Sentry, and Gusto as well as for clients like Buttondown and XOXO.
Latest Posts
Micah Nathan: Writing, I told them, isn’t supposed to be easy, and of course it can be tedious but that doesn’t make it rote. Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention....
I might be botching a Hank Green quote with the title of this post but I’ve noticed how it’s increasingly difficult to stay buoyant, to keep light on my toes, to feel optimistic about the future. In Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next...
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is a fantastic book all about mushrooms and fungi but what made it a breezy read for me was how weird they are. It’s like Merlin got his hands on creatures from another dimension where the rules of...
I made a few updates over the weekend! All the images in /photos are smartly resized and they also load as you scroll so I’m not sending you 700GB of data down the wire. I have a lot of ideas about what I’d like to turn /photos into but...
Erin Kissane: There is a lot—like a lot a lot—of research suggesting that using social media to keep up with news does not actually inform us but does makes us feel more informed. Many studies of many populations have found for knowledge...
Mass-Driver just released MD UI, a neo-grotesque type family that’s been designed to compliment Rutherford Craze and Co.’s already excellent mono-space. And just as the name implies, MD UI is designed for a different kind of reading:...
I strain to use my eye as an investigatory tool—as a pencil, with my mind the sketch pad. I am not very skilled at it, which means that I can get better. That’s Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World, a great little book about...
Here’s how writing works today. First, a tiny thing. Then: a follow-up. And then a sentence with a strangely condescending tone! The real information is right here though. Not in this sentence. Or this one. Could it be here? Nope! After...
This weekend we’re in Napa for C’s birthday. We lounged by a river and a fire pit, binoculars in hand, listening and waiting for the birds to show themselves. Earlier that morning we had a falconry lesson with Daisy, a large, powerful...
It all began with the nav. Notice how in the sidebar of this here blog where you can open and close folders to reveal more entries? Well, the tappable area of the arrow was way too small and I kept miss-clicking and selecting folders...
Uketsu’s Strange Pictures is real good. It’s one of those rare books that make you realize that a novel is a game, not just a bunch of text printed on a page. And the way that Uketsu reimagines their novel is with drawings and diagrams,...
I can’t stop thinking about a series of blog posts by Eleanor Janega I read a couple of months ago. The first is called There’s no such thing as the ‘Dark Ages’, but OK, where she writes: The medieval period was not a period of...
Watch out: a new website appears! Yesterday I published the ninenteeth official version of this website and this time round it’s inspired by the work I’ve done on developer tools these last few years. It’s my own personal IDE: you can...
It’s 4am and I’m waiting for the sunrise. I can’t remember the last time I did this—perhaps back in college after the season finale of Lost? But right now it’s pitch black outside. I can’t sleep thanks to the jet lag and my body’s...
I’ve been thinking about the web and how it’ll change with the increasingly…uh…worrying decline of search. It feels like the order of their results can no longer be trusted, the web no longer reliably scraped. Instead, this essential...