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
DJR has published a fantastic reintroduction to Roslindale that digs into the history behind the type family and why this style is still relevant today: Fonts are subject to fashion, they ebb and flow just like tastes in music and...
Democracies are the worst way to build a product. This is the reason why most tech companies are slow and ineffective: managers aren’t really there to make decisions, set a vision, or settle disputes. These sorts of organizations are...
I’ve been using Obsidian to write a story, partly for fun, partly as a de-stresser, but also to try my hand at a different form of writing. And one feature that I adore is the graph view which shows the relationships between your...
As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan in their blog post manifesto,...
The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other. It’s all super gross to me! For example, the way we describe the different kinds of work. In this world there are managers...
Here’s a fantastic essay by Sloan all about the tour for his latest novel Moonbound (I’m reading it right now and I love it to bits). Robin writes: The venue for SF in SF is the American Bookbinders Museum, where beautiful old machines...
I really like Christoph’s new website. It has everything: great visual hierarchy, great subdivision of space on big screens (something I struggle with!), and also great choice of GT Alpina for headings (I spotted that wonky,...
...as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World. [...] The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. Okay, that quote likely doesn’t mean anything to you but regardless of...
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the web is changing. Here’s Nilay Patel: There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside...
In the past I’ve watched designers hop from company to company every other year and thought to myself: Wow, what on earth are they doing? How can they possibly learn anything, how can they contribute anything meaningful to an...
Anil Dash: You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people...
Jack Cheng: Fiction is a backdoor into a communal vision. A novel – maybe every novel – is a prototype of the future. And if the ideas that the tech industry is pursuing feel stagnant, feel from the same old paratactic lists, maybe it...
The other day our landlord walked into our apartment. Just opened the door right up and headed in. They were here to fix a problem we’d never heard about, and then they began to moan about the maintenance of the building. Oh, the upkeep!...
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews for designers lately so here’s a list of all the questions I’m asking along the way and maybe this helps someone out there looking for a design gig. Beware though! I have “failed” ten thousand design...
“Are you okay, dad?” It was 7am and I found him hunched over the table in the kitchen with papers scattered all over the place. His hair was frazzled and his neck was red. I guess he had been up writing all night, scribbling frantically...