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
Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.” This UX is awful? That UI looks old? Accessibility busted? Performance bad? Design...
Matt Webb just added a new feature to his website called cursor party: If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re...
In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those...
Sarah Jeong: We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst...
Nolen Royalty writes about his wondrous One Million Checkboxes project, and how something very peculiar happened: A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours...
Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately. Also: Departure Mono is a...
Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of...
There’s this scene in Halt and Catch Fire that I think about all the time. Lee Pace (played by me) walks into an empty office with his business pal and smiles at all the emptiness. “Look,” Lee says, pointing across the room towards a...
Here’s a fantastic post by Chevy Ray about how they made a dozens of pixel fonts using Rust: Kerning was a big time hog when making my previous font packs. Because the tools I was using required every kerning pair to be manually entered,...
Man, it feels good to see Geoff back at the helm over at CSS-Tricks: Remember these? Chris would write a post now and then to chronicle things happening around the ol’ CSS-Tricks site. [...] That’s why I thought I’d dust off the...
I really enjoyed this post by Miriam where she pokes back against the whole “design ain’t a democracy thing” and argues that teams don’t need a boss, they need a process instead: What we like about a dictator is that they have a vision,...
Great episode of the Shop Talk Show here with Chris and Dave where they chatted about that whole vibe driven development thing and I worried listening back to the episode that my original post was...misleading. And arrogant. Okay, and...
The other day I was wondering what it would feel like to live my life with the comfort and safety of universal basic income: it would open up so many doors! Opportunities! Space to breathe and think! I likely wouldn’t quit my job, but I...
Jenny Wen: The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s...
Pavel Samsonov wrote this great thing about how Nike got bit by chasing the data instead of making a better product: It’s tempting to reach only for the data that’s easiest to harvest, and stop there. That’s exactly what Nike did with...