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
As we walk in the twilight-sunset-dark I find myself sniffling, then crying, then that other kind of crying. You know the kind, that overwhelming and heaving motion that takes full control but no matter how strong and disciplined I want...
For the Sentry blog I wrote about some of my experiences at work, like learning how to gather consensus and how to be political: When I first heard that you have to “sell” your designs many moons ago though I was horrified. Shouldn’t...
Stephen Coles celebrates Typographica’s 20th year with a look back through the archives and how the site began: Looking back at the bite-size, mostly-text, link-laden posts of those first few months, it becomes clear: early Typographica...
Last night, in a heated web design rage, I redesigned the tiny website of my newsletter, How Not To Make A Book. It bugged me for a while that I didn’t have archives of all the posts that are sent out via Buttondown and now it feels...
I’ve waited many days for this little thing. It’s just a tiny bit of plastic that showed up in the mail this morning. No fanfare, no angels singing, no warm, bright light. It’s just a tiny envelope, but one that happens to alter the...
We’re up earlier than usual, watching the sunrise, and our home is almost empty. The morning is crisp and pink, the soft blues of the sky are losing the fight up there between the intergalactic purples and oranges engaged in mortal...
Aegir’s website is extremely, impossibly, fantastically good. He only updates it once a week or so but when he does it’s fantastic: each blog post is a custom-designed card like Five Moons or Four Quarter Moons or The Yellow Season or...
I wrote about how we’re trying to be more playful with copywriting at Sentry and what other websites get wrong: Every website, to my ear, sounds as if it’s written by the same maniacally happy person sat at their keyboard typing. But I...
Sloan, in a post about his Spring ‘83 protocol/social network experiment, noted how it feels to be on the web right now: You feel it, don’t you? They’re all crumbling, the platforms of the last decade. It’s unsettling, but/and also...
At the beginning of the pandemic I snapped into shape. I had just been fired and dumped, my visa on the verge of expiring. All things looked down and to the right. One day, in an effort to stop feeling sorry for myself, I dragged an...
In a dazed fury the other day I saw that A Plague Tale: Requiem came out and so many folks were saying so many good things about it that I decided to pick up the first game in the series called A Plague Tale: Innocence and see what the...
I finally watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night and I have never cry/laughed as much as that before. But there was a line in the movie that struck me: When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It...
I really like what Chris says here about email: I do think it’s OK to kinda poke through your inbox sometimes just to remind your brain about things in there you might need to get to. But just marking your messages as read is essentially...
Somewhere in this sea of mustaches is my great grandfather on my mom’s side, William French. He could be any one of these faces; there’s no blondish hair, big-ish noses, or any other genetic quirk of chance that’s familiar to me. All...
106,820 people visited my website last week. Two posts had been upvoted to the top of the orange website and a hellish amount of attention was suddenly thrown my way. This has happened before and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. The...