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
In videogame design there’s the concept of ‘the loop’ – a pattern that a game has been designed around. You shoot, you drive, you jump. There’s a finite number of things you can do in a world, and the real videogame design magic is the...
Kelly Sutton has written a heartbreaking piece about empathy in software design that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for the past couple of days: There might be no reason to build the concept of “grief” into a dorm room...
In his most recent newsletter, Robin turned me onto a fascinating blog called Census Stories by the historian Dan Bouk and he recounts tales of how past censuses were made. This particular account of Agnes Parrott though, who happened to...
Andy Bell and Heydon Pickering’s new project, Every Layout, is fascinating as it hopes to document some common layout problems and describe how to build them with CSS. But there’s a post in the depths of the site called Algorithmic...
Maciej Cegłowski on why the surveillance economy should be dismantled by the government: In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or...
I love this piece by Jonas Downey where he writes for Signal V. Noise: Somewhere along the line I realized and accepted the truth: nobody really owns anything in a product made by a team. Whatever ownership you have over an individual...
Sinclair Target on what RSS is and where it went: ...two decades later, RSS appears to be a dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters and programmers with tech blogs. Moreover, among that latter group, RSS is perhaps used as much...
For as long as I can remember I’ve been inordinately stressed at work. I jump from problem to problem and work until the middle of the night and it never feels like…enough. I don’t remember the last time I returned home after a day and...
Ethan Marcotte’s talk at New Adventures is very well much worth your time if you care for the web. Ethan broadens the scope of what accessibility means and argues that it goes beyond writing good HTML and CSS. It’s about making a web,...
Facing a three day break over the Memorial Day weekend, it dawned on me: it was time to redesign this website. Not the visuals or design, as I don’t believe in redesigning personal websites like that. Instead, I needed to rethink how I...
I’ve made a mistake, a lifelong one, correlating advancements in technology with progress. Progress is the opening of doors and the leveling of opportunity, the augmentation of the whole human species and the protection of other species...
Hey maybe the reason why accessibility is getting worse and the web is breaking is because folks still think that writing CSS and HTML is “lite” coding. Hey maybe the way we fix the web is by paying front-end engineers the same as...
I’ve had a lot of questions lately about what I do for a living. Not just from my family and friends but also, heck, even a few managers that I work with at Gusto. In general there’s a lot of folks who ask me what my job is and appear to...
Every company has a Judgement Day. Once in a while the peer reviews will roll in, the managers will require a self-evaluation, and you will be Judged. No matter what you do you’ll be assigned a rating, a number, a metric, and your job...
Anna Wiener writing for the New Yorker on what’s happening with Twitter and Jack Dorsey’s failure to respond to the community: The struggle to maintain Twitter is a double referendum: first, on the sustainability of scale; second, on the...