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
The other day Amy Wibowo wrote this wondrous, illustrated essay about personal websites where she describes her growing up with the early web and how she got started: I want my website to be interesting and useful, but how? How indeed!...
A while back I read Russell Davies’s excellent Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint. It’s not really _just_ about learning how to make slide decks because extreme yawn. Instead, it’s a book about how to write well, how...
I see this all the time in design circles: a lot of folks tend to think their work must be vital in order for it to be good. Their ego demands that they wake up every day and change the world before lunch. (Hello, it is me). I feel like...
I’m obsessed with this documentary about Black Mesa, a game developed by the Crowbar Collective which is a HD copy of, and a lover letter to, Half Life. It’s a fascinating series of interviews because even if you don’t give two hoots...
A couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just...
Big news! Hot off the press, Chris writes: CSS-Tricks, this very website you’re looking at, has been acquired by DigitalOcean! [...] I will be working with the DigitalOcean team as an advisor as we transition CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean’s...
Lovely work from Alisa Burzic here called 36 Days of Type; once a day she makes a beautiful letter and although right now it’s just a bunch of tweets, it would be so cool to see each of these in a big scrolly website. Each of these...
The British countryside is all violins and pianos and I have my proof; just look out there. The train from Plymouth to Paddington is quiet but then I have two more trains—those completely unfamiliar to me—before reaching my top secret,...
John McPhee on writer’s block: You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where...
Rutherford Craze breaks down the last two years of Mass-Driver, the type foundry he started back in 2020: When I started Mass-Driver, I wasn’t certain whether the studio would still be around in 2022. I was hopeful, perhaps even...
Today we saw the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum in London. They are beautiful; 6000 year old marble panels which tell a comic book story of a Greek mythological war between Centaurs and Lapiths, with the gods watching from...
No matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables,...
Was it three years or four? It feels like a decade since I was last here. But today, here I am. Here we are. The UK. We are sniffly and dry and exhausted. Neither of us slept on the plane and I made the mistake of watching Dead Poet’s...
After reading James’ rant about dictionaries yesterday it was clear that Webster’s is the best of the lot; poetic, romantic, playful. It’s more than a dictionary, really. But after looking for an old copy I just couldn’t find a half...
Back in ye olde 2014, James Somers wrote about dictionaries and his particular fancy for Webster’s. However! James argues that dictionaries are not tools for showing you what words mean, but instead can be used as prompts for better...