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
This standup special by James Acaster called Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999 is not only the funniest show I’ve seen in a long time but also has the best explanation of Brexit I’ve ever heard. If you’ve never heard of James before (he’s...
I love RSS because of how it focuses my attention on the right stuff: big, complex, and contradicting ideas that let you chew on them over extended periods of time. No one can jump into your timeline and hijack your focus or throw junk...
Thinking about the American Rescue Plan this morning and I feel light as a feather. It fills me up with something unknown, something almost unheard of during the past year. Hope. Biden's $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package is a sign of...
Charlie Loyd wrote this great piece about Landsat 8: Here’s a picture of LA, just like an ordinary digital camera would take (if it had ten times as many megapixels and were in space). The image is only two weeks old, taken from Landsat...
One thing I love about Sentry is that it's an open source project which means that you can go ahead and look at every line of code I've written over the past year. You can see me slowly refactoring our typography, deleting unused...
On the way down to California, my dearest Lucy Bellwood stopped by to have a fun, distanced chat about websites, online dating, science writing, and Miss Piggy. It’s the first episode in our dark-web-punk-rock podcast: I’m Sorry, You’re...
I’ve long considered everything related to the blockchain to be a poison but I’ve tried to keep an open mind as much as possible. I’ve never played with the technology, never bought a coin, never owned an NFT. But you really don’t need...
Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about this piece by everest pipkin on crypto art: ...in a digital context scarcity must be constructed – there is nothing that demands the next block in the blockchain be harder to make than the...
The biggest threat to great design is bias. For example: at Sentry I’m on the Workflow team. We work on the error monitoring side of things, such as Alerts and Issues. These features notify you when a user experiences a problem with your...
Just look at this enormous woodblock illustration by Albrecht Dürer made in 1515. From The Met archives: The Arch of Honor is the artistic summation of Emperor Maximilian I’s ambitions. Combining elements from many of his other...
I imagine reading the blog of my grandmother: What did she do on her thirtieth birthday? How did she feel when she met my mom? What did she struggle with? Who did she love? What did her voice sound like? The other day Donny Trương asked...
On the subject of design engineers that’s been getting some attention in the front-end community lately (yes I am quoting myself, shut up): The problem (which I didn’t realize at the time) was that the organization I worked for was...
Austin riffed on that bit I wrote about how blogging is pointing at things and falling in love—but!—he takes it one step further when he writes what good writing is: Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate. Gosh I love that. And I...
Lewis Mcguffie, the designer of Columba, wrote this piece about designing with scale in mind: Something will always be in the shadows, or even behind a hill, we may be colour-blind, or a thing may simply be too small to see (the list is...
Marc wrote about why he still uses RSS: I've already spoken before about my general disinterest with Social Media but it wasn't until somewhat recently that I decided to really start looking for alternatives - searching for a better way...