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
For years I lived happily without a Facebook account and it was only in 2016 that I finally signed up after wanting to experiment more with Messenger for an upcoming hiking trip with some friends. Recently though I’ve considered leaving...
I got to reading this excellent post called How to Make a Book the other day and it’s a collection of advice from writers and novelists about how to get started with a book of your own: A book can be inspired by nearly anything: a...
David Foster Wallace wrote a wonderful piece on the campaign trail of John McCain back in 2000. He describes the way that we’ve been hurt by politics and how that creates a sense of listlessness and ennui: It’s ultimately just about that...
First you notice the city. San Francisco from 30,000 feet is a tiny holdout at the very tip of a cloudy peninsula. As you begin to descend you’ll see bridges and ocean, mountains and hills, as well as a patchwork quilt of skyscrapers at...
Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath is a collection of stories that I’ve been utterly obsessed with over the last couple of weeks. Although it’s a small book, I’ve been ever so slowly chewing on each and every story because I don’t want it to end....
Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem is one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. It’s a sci-fi novel set during the throes of the Cultural Revolution and focuses on a Chinese researcher who makes contact with an alien civilization. It’s the...
Earlier today I wrote a quick review for Adventures all about Jez Burrows’ new book Dictionary Stories. It’s a lovely book and I hope my review cajoles, hood winks and tricks you into picking up a copy. Here’s a quick snippet from the...
Of all the things my father tried to introduce me to, only one thing has ever stuck. There was no David Bowie or Lou Reed LP, and there was no Scotland, Spain or trip to northern France that could seduce me. Neither was there a sip of...
I’m reading this post on the value of time by Paul Ford again and dammit it’s the sort of writing that makes me reel with envy: The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room...
At Gusto we’ve been building our design system for the past two years and thinking about how to scale our product and design process across multiple complex projects and teams. So whether you’re just starting out building a complicated...
This piece by Kai Stinchcombe on why blockchain is a terrible idea is pretty dang quotable—he tackles the crazy idea that blockchain is a magical technology wand that you can wave around and solve the “trust problem” between groups of...
Here’s some advice for designers that are interested in front-end development, product design and systems design work (or in other words, designers that do design for other designers): Don’t get preachy. No-one likes it when you’re...
I loved one of the recent episodes of the podcast Track Changes about how the web has changed and, namely, how the construction of ideas and work has become a commercialized experienced on the web. Okay, that was a very clunky sentence....
There’s an unforgettable moment in the novel Tigerman by Nick Harkaway which, even over the course of several years, has been impossible for me to shake. The moment is this one: our protagonist, Sergeant Lester Ferris, is on the brink of...
Over the past week or so I’ve been reading Spineless which is a book by Juli Berwald all about jellyfish. I picked it up in the Haight only because of the design of its cover and the random paragraph that I flipped to – but that would be...