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
Vectro Type is a heckin’ neat website and type foundry from the folks that made Chartwell—a somewhat revolutionary font from back in the day that let you type in a series of numbers (c+67+33 for example) and it’s OpenType magic would...
I’ve only just started this excellent book called Web Browser Engineering but it’s already so dang good that I have to stop reading it in order to quote this section: The web is a grand, crazy experiment. It’s natural, nowadays, to watch...
Everyone shut up, Saunders is talking: In my early thirties I saw myself as a Hemingwayesque realist. My material: the time I'd spent working in the oil fields in Asia. I wrote story after story out of that material, and everything I...
One thing I love about Retail by OhNo Type Co. is that the type specimen is sort of like an essay. As you scroll through and see each of the designs for the bold, the thin, and the display styles, you also get a story about the design of...
For some daft reason I keep forgetting that you can buy fonts from I Love Typography now. They have a growing catalogue of foundries with buck wild designs and it’s worth coming back to see what just released. Take Platia by Omega Type...
What the absolute what: Teranoptia is a typeface without letters, a peculiar contraption that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures just by typing letters with your keyboard. Its design has been inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and by...
CJ Hauser: It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is...
This thing is remarkable. Designed by Andy Clymer back in 2019, Tilt is a family of the three typefaces based on signage that Andy spotted around New York City. There’s Neon, Prism, and Warp—my favorite here is Prism: Tilt Prism...
Lucy and I were texting about The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by the Arion Press the other day (it’s perhaps the most beautiful book I’ve seen in years). The shocker here is the price tag though: each book is $680! Wait, nope: that’s just...
Since I had a terrifying dentist appointment the other day I needed something to listen to whilst I clenched my fists in absolute terror. And that’s when I realized that I hadn’t listened to Web History yet, originally written by Jay...
This is dumb, but hear me out: what if there was an equivalent of Google’s Web Vitals but for design systems? What if you could look at a report that showed precisely how bad your design system was and what you needed to fix right away?...
When folks talk about design systems they often mention developer productivity (ew), or consistency (better), or accessibility (best). However, one thing folks don’t talk about often is what a good design system feels like. A good design...
Right now I feel like there’s no browser built just for me. All the options today are bloated, big, clunky; I reckon they’re all trying to do too much. Booting up Chrome today feels like moving a starship into orbit and being blasted by...
C bought a typewriter and hid it in her car. Each week she’d drive out to her parents’ house without telling me and, under this veil of secrecy, she’d type out messages on little cards. On each of them she’d write a joke, a memory, a...
Here’s a great piece—wonderfully written and expertly illustrated with maps—about how climate change is going to effect houses and beaches in the Hamptons: “Are we going to take this opportunity to reenvision the way we live with water,...