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
My favorite writing app has just been updated to include tags that you write just like a hashtag in a document, such as #design. Then all of your tags are organized and can easily be found for later. I’m not sure how useful this will be...
Cabin is my work buddy. My meditation buddy. My focus buddy. Cabin is a Spotify playlist that I’ve been adding songs to for a very long time now and it has almost ten hours of music to help me get work done. Pretty much everything I’ve...
In this game there a lot of rules. The interfaces we design should be accessible to everyone, from color blind users and those that might have limited vision, to those that might not be using a keyboard or a touch screen. Those...
Back in 2012 Tevis Thompson wrote a lovely essay called Saving Zelda where he argued that the franchise had lost its way. He treks through the history of Zelda and provides some insight as to what precisely was forgotten over the years...
In my favorite book from the Boss Fight Books collection, Derek Yu describes the process of designing and building the excellent rogue-like platformer Spelunky. There are far too many lovely moments to detail in full but one of my...
My pal Jez Burrows is working on a new project and a week ago he asked me to build what ended up being a rather lovely teaser site. It’s called And Introducing and I hope you sign up for the newsletter to learn more about it in the...
I’m not sure if you’ve heard about this but The History of the Web newsletter is simply outstanding and you ought to sign up immediately if publishing, web design and development is in your wheelhouse. One of my favorite posts is this...
Kris Sowersby has posted the transcript for his talk, 10,000 Original Copies, which happens to be all about copying and original ideas when it comes to designing new typefaces: Erik van Blokland ran a small experiment: he scanned a...
For Vanity Fair, Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written about her father, Steve: By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster...
I think about this post all about dogmatism by Chris perhaps twice a week: Hardly a day goes by I don’t see a dogmatic statement about the web. I was collecting them for a while, but I won't share them as there is no sense in shaming...
“I am compulsive about that,” Merlin explains of his obsession with punctuality and trying to teach those lessons to his kid: You can’t explain how important it is that if we need to leave the house by 7:30 […] if we made it by 7:31 then...
You can see the climate crisis everywhere, in everything. On the drive down you can see it in the signs that are posted in the dirt by farms on the edge of the freeway: “BUILD DAMS!” they scream. “WE NEED WATER, NOW” another sign begs in...
Over the past week or so I’ve been slowly watching The Vietnam War, a documentary on Netflix by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and it’s just completely, impossibly brilliant. I’m not sure if this has ever happened in war documentaries before...
Ingrid Burrington’s Networks of New York begins with a simple enough question: “How do you see the Internet?” Ingrid then explores just how shortsighted our understanding of that question quite probably is. I’ve heard the distinction...
It’s 2007: I’m sat in the kitchen watching a family friend and her four year old son talk to my mom. Over the course of a few minutes I notice how this kid, Jack, is starting to get bored; his eyes roll into the back of his head and all...