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
I love this time of year for the satisfying blocks of website tinkering. There are big mornings and long afternoons spent with a new CSS feature. Or a whole weekend rewriting the about page, fixing dark mode, poking, prodding. Every...
Redesigning this website over the weekend gave me a curious feeling. It was a deeply cozy one, as if my work sits on a continuum of all the other websites and books every made. As if my work is a link in a long chain through time. You’ll...
Adventure games had all the best characters growing up. George Stobbart. Nico Collard. Guybrush Threepwood. Elaine Marley. Then a few decades later we got Harry Dubois and Kim Kitsuragi. I love adventure games because they consistently...
Have you played Viewfinder yet? I picked it up last night on a whim and I wasn’t prepared for how brilliantly designed and creative and straight-up weird it all is. Here’s the gist: the game is about solving little puzzles by taking...
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that 90% of my design feedback comes down to these three things: Ditch those words! Ditch those words! Ditch those words! It’s the fastest way to make a design more easily understood because...
There are books and then there are books. The kind where you can’t put down until they’re finished with you. The kind that captures every atom of your attention and changes something deep down. You walk away altered, the words having not...
It often feels like optimism is an act of revenge, an act of spite or rebellion, because optimism requires diligence and effort whilst pessimism feels like the default, the thing requiring no energy or effort. Mike Monteiro wrote along...
Long time, huh? Lately I’ve felt the need to lay low, to hush myself, to be as quiet as a door mouse. Whilst the world feels so very loud and brash and full of words, stepping away from the Infinite Word Machine that is the internet has...
Here’s an eye-opening snippet from Katie Mack’s excellent book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking): The expansion of the universe as it is occurring today does more than just stretch out the light of distant galaxies. It...
The Webkit team is pitching a new idea called item-flow: The suggestion isn’t to combine all of Flexbox with all of Grid — but rather to create a new set of properties and values to “replace” specifically the flex-flow and grid-auto-flow...
Here’s Johanna Hedva: ...one of the reasons I’m so unabashedly a NIN fan, and have been for so long, is because they’ve never humiliated me as they’ve gone through the years, like nearly every other mainstream band I loved growing up in...
It’s obnoxiously beautiful right now. It’s a cracking, 10/10 stunner of a California sunset and it’s pouring in through the windows of this empty cafe as I click-clack on my infinite click-clack machine. It’s as if the whole world has...
I’ve been tinkering with an iOS app for the last month or so. It’s exciting stuff! Working in Swift and moving away from the web has made my work feel all new and fresh, with so many things to learn. The project codename is Trot (for...
The ever-so-great-and-interesting Katherine answered some questions about blogging and tagged me to do the same. Why did you start blogging in the first place? # In my late teens the web wouldn’t let me go. My favorite hobby was staying...
Kelly Sutton on why his team views big front-end frameworks as a liability: Maybe it’s the changing interest rates or political winds, but I think the “fat client” era JS-heavy frontends is on its way out. The hype around edge...