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 work. It drives me. It’s exciting. Everything about building things with folks is a pure thrill. Like when I crack open a hard design problem and learn something! Or when a test passes on a big refactor! Or when I watch a designer...
Tim Carmody wrote a piece earlier in the week about why HTML is a programming language: Because HTML looks easy and lacks features like formal conditional logic and Turing-completeness, it’s often dismissed as not a programming language....
I spotted this post by Chris Armstrong on Digital Gardening the other day and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Chris imagines a personal website being so much more than a humble blog with a series of chronological posts: A...
Design artifacts are important. Think journey maps, personas, wireframes, user research, written documents, charts, graphs, and everything else. These days they’re often stashed away in Google Docs or Figjam and in my career I’ve used...
I just hit the publish button on a new story all about technology, e-bikes, and the future. Here, look: https://robinrendle.com/stories/this-glorious-machine/ I got an e-bike about a year ago and made a draft of this story immediately....
One thing I get real excited about every year is Colly’s music roundup where he collects his favorite albums and presents them as a gift for all to enjoy. I tend to keep this page in a tab for a month or so, sifting through it slowly one...
I’m real excited about text-box, a new CSS property that helps with text alignment and layout. You might remember whispers about leading-trim from a few years back and this new syntax has replaced all that. I first spotted this bad boy...
I’m not a programmer. Plug me into a terminal and likely the only thing that you could wrench out of me is hello world. I can hack things together in the browser and I can certainly mask my contempt for Typescript for a day or two but...
Alex Russell: Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of frontend discourse. It insists that all user problems will be solved if teams just framework hard enough. This is non-sequitur, if not entirely backwards. In practice, the only...
I wouldn’t have become a designer if it wasn’t for CSS3 and HTML5. They came together at just the right time and captured everything that was so exciting about publishing and typography on the web. And I was drawn towards the web because...
This is the longest streak of not-writing in years. It’s impossible to know what to say, impossible to describe the disappointment and frustration over the last few weeks. Right now it feels best to be quiet so I’ve thrown myself into my...
Erin Kissane has started a new research studio with the most punk URL I’ve ever seen: wrecka.ge. Get out of here! That’s fantastic. But also everything about this project is, as Erin writes: We need new networks that genuinely work...
Great piece by Gareth Edwards about the soon-to-be defunct .io domain and a wild story about colonialism, borders, and the internet: In 2006, Montenegro declared independence from Serbia. With the digital revolution now firmly underway,...
I’m in New York this week for a work thing, stationed close to the Empire State building. The last time I was here it was almost a decade ago and...I didn’t have a great time. Actually, I haven't liked New York the three times I’ve been...
Mandy Brown wrote this fantastic piece about building a space on the web for yourself: A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think,...