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’ve had a few folks I admire message me over the years and infrequently it’s a bummer—gasp! wow this person is reaching out!—only to find out that they’re a bit of a jerk. But I’m never quite so sure how to deal with a jerk that I...
One of the things I regret with my website is using a third party newsletter service for Adventures. Or, at least not archiving things properly. For years I used Buttondown—an excellent service that lets you write email newsletters—and I...
Okay, so. I spent far too long trying to push my build of Astro via Netlify. Netlify is where I host my site and it automatically detects when a commit is made in GitHub. It’ll then run a build command which will tell Astro to do it’s...
Ethan on stress and design systems: You don’t start by fixing the system. You start by relieving the stress. I made a snarky tweet some time ago that’s somewhat related to this, although I hadn’t identified the feeling with stress. But...
I definitely broke the RSS feed with this but I finally moved all my posts into Astro, updated the images, rewrote basically every page and all the CSS from scratch, and managed to get it through my perhaps too complex build process....
Nicky Case writes about why RSS was so damn good: Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control. Imagine a version of the...
I’m sat at my desk crying. A beautiful light is washing over the bay right now and I’m crying because his name was Crease and he was a good boy. The boyest of boys, the goodest of goods. We named him Crease because of the tuft of hair...
Well, moving everything over from Eleventy to Astro is a little trickier than I first imagined. I’ve spent the last two days moving content around, updating the frontmatter, learning about Astro’s approach to CSS. It certainly is...
Okay, so we’re moving the ol’ site from Eleventy to Astro. I think what finally convinced me to make the switch was, of all things, gulp. gulp is an important tool to automate stuff like image optimization, JavaScript minification, and...
So I don’t know bash. But why do I need to learn it to, say, grab all the files in a folder and prepend some text to the beginning? Why if I want to do anything with files or text or manipulate any file into another kind of file I always...
The most important thing about any website is the measure. Okay, so that’s a lie. It’s not the most important thing but it most certainly is a thing. The measure is the fancy typesetting word for the width of a paragraph. Ah!—that...
Because of, you know—the omens—I’ve started working on a new design again. I’m not entirely sure what version I’m up to at this point but it doesn’t really matter. With each iteration of this website I feel like I’m getting closer to...
It starts with the jaw; wires taught, grinding teeth, clenched muscles running up and down each cheek. I catch myself biting my lower lip and pulling funny faces in an effort to release the tension. But where is all this stress coming...
I just finished reading Marcia Bjornerud’s Timefulness this morning. Marcia writes about Deep Time of the past— mountain formation and the Cambrian explosion—and Deep Time of the future—the disappearance of the Atlantic ocean and the...
Sloan explains why his newsletter is just a link to a post on his website: My enthusiasm for the approach is related to my enthusiasm for the potential of the web page circa 2021. Typography, layout, inline interaction… a bunch of things...