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
If you love sci-fi then you should read Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky immediately. A while back I wrote a bit about why it’s my favorite sci-fi novel of all time but it was only today that I read the afterword by Boris,...
I just re-read this piece from Ethan Marcotte all about design systems and how it’s kinda easy to forget that a system is really a collection of tools, and if those tools aren’t working then that’s a problem: Let’s say you, a...
Marcin Wichary has written yet another outstanding piece about how the team at Figma has redesigned how they treat line-height and spacing. But I can’t stop thinking about this bit where Marcin writes: The history of web design can be...
A while ago I wrote a piece for the folks at Figma all about one of the best ways to evangelize your design system: pairing with designers and engineers. And in that piece I collected a ton of thoughts over the last year or so doing this...
It’s about five minutes before we start shouting about Brexit. I find myself sat in the car, my brother driving me and my dad through the glorious mountain ranges and valleys of Wales. It’s the sort of landscape to make it appear as if...
Dave gathered some thoughts around blogging the other day and I agree with a lot of them but especially this one: If you ever sit down to write and the words don’t come out, don’t write. Close the computer. Do something else. This had me...
Douglas Preston investigates the oldest murder mystery on the planet when he takes a meandering and jolly wander about the extinction of the dinosaurs and almost all life on earth. Douglas writes in a way that is both poetic and teeming...
I’m hoofing it around London today preparing some last minute things for my visa. The weather could not be more beautiful as puffy little clouds float above me in a cerulean blue playground. But as I walk around I’m entirely reliant on...
I just hopped off an eleven hour flight from San Francisco and I feel like I’ve drunk a couple bottles of wine by myself. I’m waiting for my hotel room to open up so I can crawl under the bed, roll up into a ball, and sleep for an...
The strangest thing about front-end development is that it’s such a rare collection of skills that happen to be so undervalued today. You want accessibility? You need front-end engineers. You want performance? You need front-end...
This post by Kelly Sutton all about how a new technology is rarely the solution to our problems is my new favorite thing: Lately at work, I’ve found myself being a particularly conservative and sometimes curmudgeonly voice in the room...
I wrote up some opinions I have about design systems and portfolios for CSS-Tricks: In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where...
Here’s an opinion without any facts or evidence: I only care about making the design system 1% better every day. If that means deleting a bit of code that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever then that’s okay. If it means changing the font...
I’ve been working on our UI Kit at Gusto for a couple of months now – this is a project in Figma that lets other designers on our team examine our components and get a better picture of what’s available to use in their own designs....
I would heartily recommend Roadside Picnic. It’s a sci-fi novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the book’s premise is a wonderful if not entirely ghoulish one: aliens land on Earth but leave without contacting us. In their...