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 could be halfway towards LA or Vegas by now. I could be tearing it through a canyon in Yosemite. Instead, it’s midnight and I’m sat on my bike in front of O’s apartment with the engine rattling beneath me. I’m about to walk through...
In July the design systems team at Gusto shipped a beautiful thing. Over the course of three months we tried our best not just to update the brand assets, such as logos, colors, and fonts—we also felt that this was an opportunity to give...
The biggest problem with having your own blog is that it’s pretty difficult to write and publish anything. You likely don’t have a fancy Medium-style interface if you want complete control over every little detail and you’re probably...
If habits define identity, then given the amount of time so many of us devote to reloading Twitter, opening Netflix, checking reddit, et cetera, are most of our identities that of media addict? This essay by Craig Mod about the...
Giving advice about design systems is almost impossible. Every team and codebase is wildly different from one another and what works for one company now might not work for the same company in the near future. I’ve noticed this at Gusto...
I’ve been reading Chip Scanlan’s newsletter for the past couple of weeks now and I adore it. With each issue he looks at the writing process, at what works for him and other popular writers, and then he digs into a few stories. If you’re...
The longer I work on making large web apps, the more I get this feeling, a kind of sixth sense as I’m navigating an interface. It flickers on whenever I stare at a UI for long periods of time, and the more I pay attention to it the...
Garrett Dimon on quitting Google analytics: Some time ago, I removed all the tracking from my personal site, and I haven’t missed it. What started as a whimsical idea that was part performance-based, part referrer spam overload, and part...
Ed Yong: Defenders of the prize note that the Nobel committee is bound to the conditions laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will—the document that established the awards. But the will calls for the recognition of “the person”—singular—who has...
I’ve been following Scott Galloway’s work for the last couple of days; reading his excellent blog posts about the collective madness of WeWork and how we should be kinder than our parents, as well as watching his videos on how Amazon’s...
The other evening I got to reading this old rant about and how most companies don’t understand platforms, being far too focused on building short-sighted products instead of the underlying infrastructure that ties it all together....
It’s an evening of clear skies, big hearts, and extremely good Internet. I’m listening to Cabin and working on a project that is suspiciously shaped like a book. As I type, my good friend Trent Reznor is playing the piano in my apartment...
I’ve been going to the gym every day for the past three months and I’m finally starting to enjoy myself. Although yes I’m still technically obese, and I’m taking pictures of my physical progress as I go this time, it’s not really about...
I just finished listening to this episode of the Mystery Show that investigates how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is and it’s outstanding. It’s a dumb mystery but one that I adored following. Also I had no idea how funny Gyllenhaal is.
The other day I was talking to Jules about the 99% Invisible episode she’d written about. In that post, Jules excitedly quotes the episode with Hank Green where he says: [...] there are all these phenomena in human life that are really...